Tonight he says, “It feels good to put some things to rest.” He is being direct, and though my instinct is to shrink away, I’m grateful for his concern. Being younger, he doesn’t defer to me as he might, except concerning Quinn. I know Evan wants to stop sneaking around, though only once has he hinted as much. Last night, one side of his mouth had twitched up, acknowledging the cliché, as he’d said, “He’s not a kid anymore.”
Now I say, “You’re right about the apartment. I’m going to take care of it.” But even saying the words spins me into a moment of distraction, a spilling out of my agitation, and my gaze drifts to the edge of the yard, where the bushes meet the fence in a perimeter of darkness.
“Good.” Evan leans over and cups his hand on my cheek, startling me back to him with his touch. “You’re in need of some rest yourself, you know, Beena. You’re pale as a ghost.”
A cloud passes in front of the moon, as swift and eerie as a movie backdrop, and the suddenness of its shadow makes the earth beneath us seem tired and old. I want to say that ghosts don’t need to rest — or they can’t, or they won’t — but I don’t know if I mean myself or my sister.
If Sadhana’s a ghost, I haven’t seen her. I haven’t spotted any signs of her shading my footsteps or tracing my name across a rain-soaked window. In a way, though, I’m not surprised. I spent so many years watching her disappear, little by little, that it is impossible for me to believe that there could be any of her left over.
Ghosts ought to have been my specialty. There were enough dearly departed in my family to haunt a dozen Gothic novels, and if I never stopped to listen for a telling knock or squinted through the darkness for a hazy outline, it was only because doubt flowed through my veins more palpably than the blood of any continent. My sister and I were skeptics. Angry and cynical as only skeptics who have waded (who have swum, who have been given water births) into belief truly can be. But that was later. At the beginning, there was me, and there was Sadhana. There were Papa and Mama. And there were the things that Mama told us.
Mama was a very theoretical woman. I mean, she was a real woman, who was interested in theories of all kinds. When she showed us the stars, she held my sister Sadhana on her lap and pointed up at the thin strip of night sky. What we could see from our balcony was bounded by the roofs of other buildings crowding up in one direction towards the slope of the mountain, the other sides shunting back our perspective with an excess of light, street lamps brightening the darkness to a grey glow in every distance.
“The stars that we see are in the past,” said Mama. “It takes thousands of years for their shining to reach the Earth.”
With her pale face as a guide, a moon in my field of vision, I struggled to make out the points of light, stretching myself flat on the wine-coloured rug. Mama’s voice above the street sounds was solemn and full of wonder.
“There’s a theory,” Mama said, “that the universe is getting bigger. It will keep expanding, like a huge loaf of bread rising, like a great fat belly, until there’s nothing left to make it out of, no more heat. It will be like a day that is so long it goes on forever, until time is a substance and it is made out of ice.”
Sadhana was only four, two years younger than me, and she was falling asleep on Mama’s skirt, her fat brown chin drooping onto Mama’s freckled arm. Sometimes Mama would get started on something and she’d tell us all about it, even when there was no way we’d understand. I sat up to pay attention, to draw myself towards them. Mama pointed out a constellation that I couldn’t see, the Big Dipper just a name for a stretch of sky between one wave of her hand and another.
“There’s also a theory,” said Mama, “that the universe is getting smaller. Millions of years from now it’s going to start shrinking and heating, like fat and flesh melting into bone, because it is the destiny of things to come together. All that there is will get closer and closer until there’s no space anymore between anything, even between the things themselves.”
“Like soup?”
“Like cosmic soup,” said Mama, “that boils away into nothing.”
She pointed to a faint spot that was hard to make out. “My lucky star,” she said.
I leaned my head on her knee and felt her fingers threading through my black hair, as she murmured more about the legacy of dying stars, their nighttime brilliance. It seems to me now that all my memories are like this — points of light in a dark field, now clear and now slipping away, and no matter how much I look, I still can’t spot for certain where I should be joining them up in patterns, constellations of what a life could mean.
In theory, when a person dies, they’re gone forever. At least that’s what I think now. Before she died, Mama always talked about reincarnation, but it got to be too troubling for me and Sadhana, sizing up every cat and dog that looked as if it might be coaxed into following us home, the babies with blue eyes grasping air in their fists from their strollers. The hummingbird we spotted on the balcony, skimming forward and back before the feeder, its wings beating as many times per second as our hearts might in a minute. When I watched it, looking for signs of my mother, my pulse felt faster, as though the bird itself was skittering around inside and had taken up the place where my heart should be, where Mama told us she would keep on living forever and ever.
My sister and I were born exactly two years apart at the same hospital. Named for a queen no longer revered, the hospital stood on the side of the mountain that was the volcanic heart of our island city. It had been more than two hundred years since the English took the city from the French as the spoils of war, but the battle was still being waged whenever people forgot that most of the time we all got along just fine. That the French were the true victors and had claimed an ancient gathering place in the name of their lord and kingdom was obvious in the hundred-foot cross erected on the top of the mountain — once a real wooden cross that Maisonneuve planted to thank the Virgin for saving Montreal from a flood, but by our time a giant hulk of steel that lit up the city’s night skyline for a distance of forty miles.
In our little neighbourhood north of the mountain, it was just as common to hear Greek or Yiddish or Italian as it was to hear French or English. At our family’s store, famous for making wood-fired bagels in an oven that devoured trees like the furnace of hell itself, nearly every day was brightened by the chime of tourists with the hard shine of American accents.
It would have been to our mother’s perpetual regret, if she had believed in such a fruitless notion, that we were born at the hospital and not at home in our little apartment above the shop. Mama told us that Papa had insisted. “He said if anything went wrong, almost all he knew about was making bagels, which could hardly be of very much help. Same thing with pie crust.”
Papa also thought that the bathtub was too small for such momentous events. He had been born in India, in the Punjab, and he had arrived with such admirable rapidity that he was very nearly delivered in the central courtyard of his village where they kept the livestock. As it was, the woman who helped bring him into the world had also attended at the births of the healthiest local cows, which was considered by his extended relatives to be a fortunate circumstance. But for his own children, there could be no greater distinction than to greet the universe in a hospital where the doctors were paid to look after human beings and nothing else. He wrote to his parents in India, announcing each addition to the family, but nothing ever came in return except for overexposed photographs of the young Indian daughters of their friends. All the women he might still be able to marry if he tried.
Our parents rarely spoke of how they met and fell in love, ignoring our questions with the same implacable front they presented to bedtime negotiations or fussy standoffs over unpalatable foods. Papa would get stern, his thick lips pressed together as he turned his back on us to indicate there were some things we had no share in. Mama, for her part, said we would be making our own love stories soon enough, tha
t there was no call to get greedy for theirs as well. We found this ridiculous considering how often she talked to us about her lost draft dodger whom she’d followed to Canada, or the other men, presumably lovers, who had brought her important messages from the universe.
I tried to imagine her through Papa’s eyes, a pale sprite at the gurdwara, the white of her turban setting off her fair skin to disadvantage, her pink eyelids and blue-veined temples standing out in the absence of any other colour. Her chin lifted at an angle, revealing an awareness of glances from the people around her. Papa said once, when pressed, that he fell in love with Mama’s purity of soul before he cherished her as a woman, but I think it might just as easily have been that touch of defiance in her jaw — the rebelliousness that so often made my heart sink towards my shoes — that first caught his attention and lured him away from the traditions of his strict upbringing. Or it could have been the look of her nipples, just barely visible through her layered white cotton shirts, or her toes peeking out below her skirts, small and rounded like tiny pearl onions. Or her perfume of patchouli and musk oil, spicy like sex and old religions.
Or it could have been that Papa had always been different. He came from a place where the details of his birth might have constricted his life, his love, and even his thoughts. But they didn’t. He followed the rules the way he followed a recipe: carefully, thoughtfully, and sometimes, at the last moment, with an inspired change.
But contrary to the opinion shared by his brother and the rest of the family back in India, Papa remained a believer. He wrote to his father about the equality of all human beings, both men and women, according to the very teachings of the holy gurus. He wrote to his mother urging her to reread the scriptures. Later, he wrote to apologize for his disrespect, but he was not cowed by his parents’ fury into believing he had made a mistake by marrying a white woman. Instead, he prayed for them.
On the morning everything changed, August twenty-first, 1978, Papa announced his intention to take a hukam from the Guru Granth Sahib, the big holy book compiled in the age of the gurus. He often did this after breakfast, opening to a passage at random to give us insight into the day to come. Sadhana and I watched from the kitchen table with the near fanatic joy we always reserved for family rituals. I felt an unwarranted proprietorship over the practice: the first letters of our names were chosen from the first letter of special hukams taken after we were born. Sadhana, just three, loved it all without really understanding.
Papa was in his yellow cotton pyjamas. We were a family who breakfasted in pyjamas — another beloved point of observance for me and my sister. In his bare feet, he stepped over to the special shelf where the book was kept and unwrapped it from its silk covering. Everything that he did was gentle and deliberate. He read aloud the first line of the hymn, the shabad, he had turned to. His voice was quiet but resonant, even as he covered his mouth with one of Mama’s embroidered handkerchiefs as a sign of respect.
He read it in Gurmukhi before translating it into English: “The One Lord is the Creator of all things, the Cause of causes.”
Mama waited until Papa had replaced the sacred book before she got up to kiss him. When she dropped back down from her tiptoes, Papa smiled at all of us, and the smile travelled up to his eyebrows and all the way into his orange turban. “I don’t want to be late,” he said.
“You never are,” said Mama. She cupped his face with one of her small hands before he went off to the bedroom to get dressed.
And after all that, after that normal, considerate conversation that might not have happened in exactly that way but probably did, my quiet, excellent Papa went down to our bagel shop and died.
On the day Papa died, the temperature in the bagel shop was a sweltering thirty-eight degrees.
“Hotter than Calcutta,” said one ambulance attendant to the other. They spoke in low tones in French, and they had already given up. They were wheeling Papa’s body on the collapsible gurney out through the back kitchen, where the employees watched with grief and awe as the Boss was taken past the stainless steel counters, the ancient metal shelving unit full of flour sacks, and the cords of wood stacked nearly to the ceiling behind the ovens. Somebody gasped as Papa was manipulated with difficulty around the industrial mixer before being levered out the back door and into an ambulance. He was so still that his soft cheeks wobbled above his floury beard. The apron tied around his sweat-soaked shirt was dirty from the fall to the floor as his heart seized. His own grandfather had died the same way, of sudden heart failure, working in the fields in the Punjab.
Mama, who had already rushed down to my father’s side, felt a pity for the bagel workers that she did not yet feel for herself, and while she rode to the hospital, an elderly cashier named Lefty came upstairs to watch us. When Mama returned, hours later, she tried her best to explain, but for once, her metaphors failed her. She told us what she had seen (the flour sacks, the soft cheeks), and what she had heard (the murmured French, the frightened gasp), and how Papa was gone before she even got down there to kiss him goodbye.
We were sitting on the sheepskin rugs in the living room, and when Mama finished talking, she rose and went to the mantelpiece, with its purple brocade runner topped with her collection of inspirational objects: a carved dolphin, an orange pillar candle in the shape of a star, a jam jar full of sand from a beach in British Columbia, where she said she had “found her purpose.” There was a horseshoe from Galway, where she was born, and a braided ribbon from San Francisco, where she’d gone next. There were cowry shells and a conch, and stones of all shapes and sizes on a silver tray, some with flecks of mica, others with the fossil shadows of small creatures long dead. There were feathers, too, that she had found, goose and peacock and one from a red cardinal, poking up out of a green Plasticine turtle and fanning in the breeze from the window. And there was a tiny brass cobra, coiled upright at attention as though charmed or about to strike. I could hear Mama breathing as she lit the candle with unsteady hands, and when she turned back to us, she looked girlish rather than serene.
“Stay awake with me?” She phrased it as a question with a measure of hesitance. I could not remember her ever having asked us for something in quite the same way. I held Sadhana’s hand and nodded as I squeezed it, waking my sister from her light doze.
We sat up that whole long night with our mother, and the world grew black as we wept, which was right, and the stars winked on one by one, like cosmic comedians with unbearable mirth, and when the sun had not yet risen, Mama pulled out the mats and bent herself forward and back, stretching in silence from Bhujangasana to Parvatasana, her whole body seeming to collapse and expand in turn as she moved through her yoga postures like a dance with space. Then she began to chant, and I felt goosebumps spread over my skin. The chanting had no words I could recognize or understand, but as the pitch rose and fell in waves of rhythm it reminded me of a dream I had forgotten, in which I stood onstage and sang a song I made up as I went along. I knew they were the same sacred mantras Mama had sung every morning before sunrise since before we were born, but the sounds that came out were as worn and reedy as a tin whistle, as though all the air had gone out of her.
I remember the desperation of my sorrow in the days that followed as a terror of being alone. The phone rang and rang with condolences and I always ran to answer, just to hear a voice, any voice, not transformed by grief into something almost unrecognizable. Mama clutched my sister to her chest, her face flat and tear-glazed as she held out her other arm for me to take my own comfort if I could. Sadhana was too young to understand what was happening, and I was jealous of her ignorance. But her inability to comprehend that Papa was gone for good seemed to give peace to our mother. She held my sister on her lap like a worry doll, stroking her long black hair.
Six weeks later Mama asked Uncle for the name of an Indian astrologer. Though he frowned and narrowed his eyes, he was not a hard enough man to be able to refuse the request
of a widow, even if she was a white woman he disapproved of.
“In Indian astrology,” Mama said to us, “they use a different zodiac. Instead of only looking at the Earth and the sun and the planets, they calculate using the fixed stars, too.”
We knew about astrology from the back of the newspaper, where the comics were, and from Mama always pointing out her lucky star, though she claimed not really to believe in it, or maybe just a little less than she believed in most things. I asked her what she would do if the astrologer gave her bad news, and for only the second time in my whole life, I saw her hesitate.
“It’s just one way of looking and seeing,” she said with a hint of apology. And then, “Like guessing how many jelly beans in a jar.” She undid the elastic holding up her long red-gold hair and let it unwind and fall to either side of her face before twisting it to put it up again. “Or, if it’s anything, it’s just a weather forecast, liable to change at any moment.”
I was worried about this explanation because she had taught us that the stars had paths they were bound to, their own places among the others that never changed. And if you couldn’t be sure, why even bother to ask?
When she came home, she told Uncle to come and pick up Papa’s clothes. Then she took all the silverware out of one drawer and put it into another.
“What did the astrologer say, Mama?” I was anxious to know. “What was the forecast?”
“He said nothing,” said Mama. She looked surprised and a little blank. “Nothing that meant anything.”
From then on, Papa’s death triggered in Mama a deep storytelling urge. She had always been ready with theories, if not facts, to frame our experience, scooping them out like salves for all the little wounds and worries of childhood — but all at once she seemed driven by an urgency to form the stuff of our lives, of Papa’s life especially, into something strong and beautiful before it cooled. Molten gold, fresh from the forge. The workings of these tales were so intense and profuse that we began to trip over them like guards in a Vatican storehouse. A coronet. A hammered bowl. A candelabrum with twelve arms reaching out towards the ceiling. Although later we sometimes pretended differently and at other times it was hard to tell, most of what we came to remember about Papa came from these stories Mama told us.
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