Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  There is an update on the little Quebec town with the five-page, so-called welcome bulletin for potential immigrants, drafted by the mayor and town council. It is a text that has become infamous.

  “It’s embarrassing,” I say. It is an all-white, all-French town. A tiny place with a population the size of a high school, they have made headlines around the world by deciding to take an ignorant stand. Among other things, the document forbids covering the face except at Halloween, belittles cultural dietary restrictions, and outlaws the public stoning of women.

  “Private stoning’s okay, though,” says Quinn. He’s out of sight of the television, but not out of earshot.

  “This isn’t funny. They’re going out of their way to single out people of different religions and insult them.”

  “You’re not crazy about any of those religions either,” says Quinn. “Or the segregation of men and women, all the things they’re talking about.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  I can almost hear him shrug. “What’s wrong with banning stoning? You like stoning?”

  “Of course I don’t like stoning.”

  Uncle has been frowning in concentration, trying to hear the broadcast. As the segment wraps up, he says, “I think probably they are only afraid of losing their own culture. I can understand that. Look at your son. Quinn probably does not even know what a kirpan is.”

  “I know what it is,” says Quinn.

  “Hmm.” Uncle folds his hands over his stomach.

  “Even if Quinn had one,” I say, “he wouldn’t be allowed to carry it to school there. Did you see that bit about ceremonial daggers? Never mind what the Supreme Court says.”

  “I saw, yes. But it depends what is in their hearts, the people of this town.”

  That Uncle could remind me of Mama is not something I would ever have believed. “Hate,” I say, anyway. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m sure there’s a bit about turbans, too, for your information.”

  “Maybe not hate. Maybe only fear.”

  “Is there a difference? Are you saying we should be tolerant of other people’s intolerance?” I think about reminding him of the fire, the spray-painted swastikas out front that took ages to remove, but I know he cannot have forgotten.

  “Maybe,” Uncle says again. “It depends.”

  Then there is a story about a refugee family claiming sanctuary in the basement of Saint-Antoine Church, a few neighbourhoods north. A man, a woman, and their one-year-old son, who was born in Canada. The mother is Somali, but a permanent resident. The father, an Algerian refugee named Bassam Essaid, lost his appeal to stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds.

  “The church is letting them stay?” says Quinn, as the voice-over by an English interpreter patters around a clip of an interview with one of the parish priests. Just out of view of the screen, Quinn is straining to follow. “Why don’t the police go in there and get them?”

  “It’s a kind of tradition,” I say. “Churches are considered inviolate. A sort of sacred space, higher law kind of thing.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So,” says Quinn, considering, “if I committed a crime, I could just go find a church and nobody could arrest me?”

  “No,” says Uncle.

  “It probably depends on the crime,” I say.

  They’ve turned to a picture of the family onscreen, a father, mother, and baby. There’s no telling why a flash of longing or sympathy goes out to someone you hardly know. What my mother would have called vibes and what science sometimes calls pheromones. Sadhana would have said it has to do with faces, with the bones in someone’s face. The proportions between eye and brow, nose and chin. The magical ratios set out beneath our skin and underpinning our whole lives. I remember Sadhana having a theory that, however it might torment and elude those who seek it, beauty, and love of beauty, is what makes us civilized.

  “I know that family,” I say. And I do. I’ve seen the couple in the photo before. “Sadhana knew them.”

  Nobody seems to hear me. But I remember when my sister showed me the photo, a quick click of her mouse to another window, in illustration of a story she was telling me — the basics of her ongoing work with No Borders, the refugee activist group sprung from her women’s knitting circle. She was working on emails on her laptop during a weekend in Ottawa, trying to finish something pressing to do with a Monday morning hearing in front of the immigration board.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Bee,” my sister had said, bringing her knees up to sit cross-legged in my swivelling desk chair. “What Bassam Essaid has been through to stay here. It’s so bureaucratic and unfair. They’re trying to make an example of him because he’s an activist helping other non-status Algerians.”

  She’d pushed her hair behind her ears as her brown eyes blazed amber, and I remember puzzling over the composed nature of her outrage. Sadhana in a fury was usually either a tempest or a flash freeze. Clicking closed the window with the picture, she went back to work on her email, her fingers drumming the keyboard with an unhesitating patter as I wondered at my own surprise at the admiration I felt.

  The story on television wraps up with a series of sound bites from neighbourhood residents. Midway through, Uncle makes a startled movement that draws my attention to a fleeting caption at the bottom of the screen: RAVI PATEL, LOCAL POLITICIAN, MOUVEMENT QUÉBEC/QUEBEC FIRST. Without the clue, I doubt I would have recognized the teenaged boy I once knew. And even before I hear what he has to say, the knowledge is a whip to my racing pulse. The English translation dogs the words of the original, but with a modulated tone at odds with the sentiments expressed by Ravi Patel, local politician: “These people think they don’t have to follow the rules, but they deserve the same treatment as everyone else, church or no church. And if they don’t like it, they can leave.”

  “Harsh,” says Quinn from the kitchen as the segment ends. He gives up on the pizza, puts the rest in the fridge, and comes to join me on the couch. He sits at the other end while I let out my breath slowly. I dart a glance at Uncle, but he appears absorbed in the screen. Taking a cue from him, I keep my gaze facing forward as I feel my expression dissolving into panic. Even if he looked, I doubt Quinn would notice the blankness of my mouth and eyes. I’m only his mother, after all.

  Sadhana and I walked to school together every day, through a compact rooted somewhere between convenience and sentiment. We had always walked together. Even before Sadhana was old enough to attend, she and Mama had squired me there together, and my sister’s wet kiss on my cheek had been no less essential than Mama’s hug at the gate and their mutual, final waves from the corner when I turned once before going inside. These days Sadhana may have been harbouring a secret anger, of which only I and any other guilt-ridden readers of her diary would be aware, but I was at least a willing, if unresponsive, audience to her morning monologue as she geared up for school.

  School was hardly a refuge from the home scrum, though Sadhana seemed to take it that way. My ears would still be ringing from Uncle’s bitter epithets as we turned the corner of our street, as Sadhana began her transformation from sulky niece to sparkling high school freshman. Her glare fell away, her laugh returned. She skipped over sidewalk cracks in her pink and white sneakers as she gossiped to me about the girls in her grade, ignoring my affected boredom and the miserliness of my mumbled responses. Every story she told about her classmates was animated by a spirit of fun that made everyone come out looking better at the end. At the intersection, she applied lip gloss in the pause of the red light, while I reflected on the seething rage in her diary. I watched for the turn of the green and always stepped first off the curb, so that for a moment I could be away from her and the sham happiness that made everything harder.

  Each wing of our high school had its own adolescent anthropology. My locker had always been on the third floor near the science labs, along w
ith most of the kids in my homeroom, and Sadhana’s was down the hall past the water fountain, in sight, if not within earshot. Her end of the hallway was the favoured hangout of the most popular kids in the tenth grade, as well as ninth graders, like Sadhana, in the know. Hot-and-heavy couples who wanted to make out had their lockers assigned to the end of the second floor near the French classrooms. Faun-legged freshmen usually had their lockers on the first floor, near the principal’s office, as they didn’t yet know enough to avoid the roving eye of Saul, the attendance officer, and his unpredictable coffee runs.

  I had stopped eating lunch with the friends I’d had since grade school. If I might once have been surprised by how quickly things fell away, the past year had cured me. It had been five months since Mama died, but it felt like forever. All the time stretching ahead of me seemed like forever, too, but empty. There was a poster on the guidance office door with a picture of a hot-air balloon that said ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES! Every time I walked by, I thought, That sounds about right. Endless.

  I returned smiles and exchanged hellos in the hallway between classes, but as soon as the lunch bell rang, I ran to the cafeteria to line up for spicy fries and chocolate milk and a Styrofoam container with the hot lunch, no matter how disgusting. Then I took it down the hallway and ate sitting on the floor in front of my locker, which I’d had switched to the basement.

  My new corridor in the basement was populated mostly by Chinese kids a grade below me, two of whom I knew a little from junior orchestra, where a battered viola had suffered the travails of my ambition before I’d dropped out. After a week of my silent spectating, they invited me to play cards with them. From then on, we spent the lunch hour playing Hearts in the basement hallway, an interminable game with an ongoing daily tally maintained by Hung Ma on the back of his physics notebook.

  Once Sadhana passed by on her way from the cafeteria to the girls’ bathroom and stopped in surprise to see me with people she didn’t recognize. She had changed into a weather-­inappropriate black tank top she definitely hadn’t been wearing when we left home, and she was with Jennica Moore, who was acting as if we hadn’t met dozens of times before.

  “Hey, sis,” I said. Since I’d moved my locker, it sometimes happened that we didn’t see each other at all after we parted ways in the morning.

  Everyone I was sitting with looked up. Vicky Chen stopped trying to fold her limp napkin into an origami box. Matthew Lee paused in dealing the cards.

  “Hey,” said Sadhana. She hesitated for a second, then turned and went into the bathroom. Jennica followed, already whispering in her ear.

  Matthew was the school’s best trombonist, or best boner, as he preferred to be known, and he was planning on becoming a virologist. In the meantime, he had become my main competition in the Hearts tally, which had scores already numbering in the hundreds.

  “That’s your sister?” he said, still staring after the door had swung closed. I saw Hung and Vicky exchange a look. Not many ninth graders were known throughout the school. Only the exceptional ones. Besides being pretty, Sadhana was on the track team and the volleyball team, and she had already starred in a school play.

  “Yes.”

  “Cool.” He turned back and started to deal out the next hand.

  The best part about the basement hallway was that nobody was much interested in talking.

  Sadhana met up with me after school that day, falling in step as I turned onto the corner of our street. She said, “What happened to Julie?” Julie Paysant and I had been friends since we were eight years old. One time, she had shown Sadhana how to take cat’s cradle further than any of my sister’s classmates in the first grade.

  “Nothing happened to her,” I said. I thought of Julie’s peaked, devilish eyebrows and the beaded bracelets we’d bought each other out of the grocery store vending machine two summers ago. There was a space around the thought of her that seemed like it might quicken into sadness, but it didn’t come. “Things change.” Julie still smiled at me in homeroom and ate lunch with everyone near the soccer field. She had called steadily throughout the fall, but there was nothing I could think of to talk about, so I never called her back.

  “Yes,” said Sadhana. “They do.”

  We walked in silence for a while, past the Italian butcher and the good corner store with the milk that was never expired and the bench outside the Greek bakery where a toffee-coloured poodle had its leash tied up every afternoon around four.

  “Beena,” said Sadhana, and her voice beckoned from the thrall of our old games, urging me to play along. “Do you think we’re going to be happy?” There was a young couple coming down the street, and the woman had a baby strapped to her chest, facing front. As the mother walked, one hand on his stomach, the baby’s legs jiggled. His face was all wide-open amazement. The father was carrying bags of bagels, laughing at something.

  “Yes,” I said. Against my sister’s hopeful smile, small falsehoods seemed like the safest balm. “I do.”

  Sadhana slowed as we passed the baby and stopped the parents to coo over him. After they moved along, Sadhana linked her arm through mine as we came into view of the shop.

  “And do you think Mama misses us as much as we miss her, wherever she is?”

  “Yes,” I said again, though the conversation was bringing me dangerously close to tears. “Oh, here we are.” I fished the key out of my knapsack to let us in, and I let Sadhana bound past me up the stairs.

  The next time I checked her diary, my sins seemed to have faded from its pages. Only Uncle’s misdoings remained. Yesterday when Uncle got home from the gurdwara, he complained that the tub was clogged and ordered me to clean it out. But it was probably all his stupid beard hair, anyway! All he needs is a pointy hat to look just like a giant garden gnome.

  With a relief that felt close to happiness, I put it back, vowing never to touch it again.

  If Uncle was like a gnome with his long black beard, then Ravi was like an Indian god. Krishna, maybe, whom we’d read about in Mama’s illustrated mythology books, the consummate lover who multiplied himself so he could dance in the forest with each and every milkmaid at once.

  Ravi had been working at the shop since before Mama’s accident, though he was just another one of the bagel boys, the mostly teenaged males of mainly South Asian descent whom we viewed as our own private stable of potential crushes. We’d canter a passing interest around the block to see how it felt before committing, then pick one of them and doodle his first name (we rarely knew their last names without concerted investigation) over and over in a notebook before moving on to the next. Sometimes we both liked the same boy at once, but it wasn’t a problem since we never spoke to them, just kept tabs on them from the balcony. We were lucky in that way, to have so many distractions. It was probably what kept us clear of any real boyfriends at school, what we perceived as this multitude of options.

  We’d been neglecting the bagel boys since Mama died, but we’d picked up with them again after Uncle came to live with us. If Mama had discovered our fascination, she never let on, though I think she must have known by the way we were always lying stretched out on the balcony, so we could hear the boys chatting and fooling around outside during their smoke breaks. We kept our heads down so as not to be seen because we hadn’t yet mastered the art of flirting. Ravi was one of the most prominent bagel boys since he was always out on smoke break. I’d started to pick out his voice before any of the others because he had a funny way of saying Rs, as if his tongue was just barely skimming the roof of his mouth and he’d cut out the roll altogether. Not so bad that Ravi became Wavi, but enough so that his whole manner of speaking sounded exotic and lazy and cool.

  After supper was when Sadhana always went for her run, and, casting around for something to do, I would read or finish my homework. If Uncle was out when she got back, sometimes Sadhana would flop down on her bed after her shower and start talking, and
it was easy again between us, now that I was able to leave her diary alone. We talked about people at school, the ins and outs of her group of friends, and the things we might do when we finally managed to get away from Uncle, though the last was hard to imagine. More and more, and maybe since it was easiest, we talked about boys.

  We were reminded of Ravi on a night that Uncle was downstairs working, and Sadhana and I made a bowl of popcorn seasoned with nutritional yeast and a pitcher of iced mint tea and went out to camp on the balcony. We had things timed to be in position before the evening shift took their first smoke break at nine-thirty. I’d just lain down on my stomach, Sadhana settling down on her back to keep an eye on the stars, when the door below creaked open.

  “Man, I think he wants me to quit.” That was Ravi, talking about Uncle.

  “He sure rides you hard enough.” That was Carlos, one of the more long-term and upstanding of the shop’s employees. He knew Sadhana and me, and Mama. He’d even been up to our apartment once, to pick up a late paycheque.

  “He’s had it in for me since I started. Can’t figure it.”

  “It’s easy.” Carlos was chuckling in his low way that could sound like coughing if you didn’t know better. “You don’t say ‘Yes, sir. No, sir’ like everyone else. Don’t you have ears in your head? That’s all it takes. The boss is old-fashioned, so that’s how you got to play it.”

  “Huh.”

  “Listen, I just gave you the best piece of advice you ever got. Nobody else wants to tell you because it’s nice for us when he’s got his whipping boy already picked out.”

  I wriggled to the edge of the balcony and peeked over. I could see Ravi, fingers idling in his lavish black hair, his face creased in contemplation of Carlos’s bestowed wisdom. Carlos was tapping the ends of the cigarettes left in his pack, counting them maybe. They were both in their white bagel aprons, the ones that used to be printed with the name of the shop in red until Uncle switched the logo to a cartoon bagel with a face on it. It was safe to sneak peeks because the bagel boys never looked up. That ought to have been a clue never to get involved with any of them.