When She Was Queen

by M G Vassanji

  That night she and Abid spent many tender moments together. At length, when they were ready to go to sleep, he asked, “Is it too late for you to have a child?”

  “I think so. Why, you want one? I could ask the doctor.”

  “No…. We are both done with that. We need all the time to be with each other and enjoy life.”

  “I agree.”

  And so, said that voice in her head, as she lay on her back, wide awake but eyes gently shut, happy, listening to her own breathing, and that of the man beside her. And so, said that voice, a smidgin of sex, a bit of meri jaan, and you’ll go out tomorrow wearing a tent on the head—

  Stop it! He loves me, and it’s not a tent. You know that…. And what do you mean by “a smidgin of sex” anyway? He’s better at it than you were by a long shot—

  Oh yeah, I didn’t see you exactly moaning with helpless pleasure now or screaming for more—

  It’s not just the moaning and screaming, you insensitive man, it’s also the gentleness, the love you feel inside every pore of your entire body, the—

  I see.

  That takes care of him, she thought, regaining her breath. Finally. She sensed him receding from her mind … he would go away for ever now, truly dead. She realized all of a sudden that she didn’t quite want that to happen. She began to miss him.

  Karim? she called.

  Yes? Sullen, and distant, as if from the door.

  But I do need you … stay …

  Aw, he said.

  It was almost a year since Abid had come into her life.

  Last Rites

  “Shamshu Mukhi,” she said, “how are you?”

  I had just stepped out of the front doorway of the Don Mills mosque and onto the stoop, where she had been standing, waiting.

  “Hale and hearty, and how is the world treating you, Yasmin,” I replied jovially. The formal address mukhi always provokes an exaggerated, paternal sort of cheeriness in my manner that I can’t quite curb and (as I’ve realized over the years) don’t wish to either, because it is what people expect, draw comfort from. But no sooner had my glib response escaped my lips than I was reminded by her demeanour that lately the world had not been treating Yasmin Bharwani very kindly.

  I asked her, more seriously: “And how is Karim—I understand he’s in hospital?”

  A pinprick of guilt began to nag. It was more than a week now since I heard that her husband, who had been a classmate of mine, had been admitted for something possibly serious. I had not seen Bharwani in years, our paths having diverged since we ended up in this city; still, I had meant to go and do my bit to cheer him up for old times’ sake. Only, with this and that to attend to, at home and away, that good thought had simply sieved through the mind.

  She nodded, paused a moment to look away, before turning back to reply, “He’s at Sunnybrook. I’ve come to ask, can you give him chhanta?…”

  “Now, now, Yasmin, don’t talk like that. It can’t be serious—he’s young yet, we all are.” (That irrepressible bluster again—who was I kidding, since when has the Grim Reaper given a hoot about age?) “And what will your unbelieving husband Karim say to my giving him chhanta—he will scream murder.”

  Chhanta is the ceremony at which a person is granted forgiveness by his mukhi on behalf of the world and the Almighty. You join hands and supplicate once a month at new moon, and then finally at death’s bed. I recall a sceptical Bharwani from our boyhood days arguing with hotheaded arrogance, “What have I done against the world that I should crave forgiveness all the time?” And some of us replying, “If nothing else, you might have stepped on an ant and killed it, ulu—even an angel commits at least seven sins daily, and what do you think, that you are better than an angel?” We called him “Communist” in those teen years, which nickname he rather relished, for it had intellectual connotations and set him apart from the rest of us, all destined for the heavenly embrace.

  “Try, please,” his wife now begged me. “He’s dying … and there’s another matter too….”

  At this moment Farida joined me, and we invited Yasmin to come home and have supper with us, when she could also unburden her mind. We had anticipated a quiet Sunday evening together, but such sacrifices of privacy have been our pleasure, having brought meaning to our lives as we approach what are called our more mellow years. It is a traditional responsibility that I hold, as presider of a mosque, father to its community; nothing could seem safer for someone so conventional, indeed mediocre, as I, until Yasmin and Karim Bharwani put me through an ordeal from which I don’t think I recovered.

  Yasmin must be some five years younger than both my wife and I; she is petite and trim, fair complexioned, with short dark hair. She was dressed smartly that night, though perhaps a bit sternly. She had her own car, so we met in the lobby of our building and went up together. At first we discussed anything but the gloomy subject at hand, her husband’s illness. Finally, over a swiftly put-together supper, an assortment of leftover and fresh, I said to Yasmin, who was waiting for just such a prompt, “Now tell us what’s this other matter that you mentioned.”

  She looked anxiously at me and said all in a rush: “My husband wishes to be cremated when he dies.”

  I spluttered out a quite meaningless: “But why?” to which nevertheless she answered, “I don’t know why, I don’t understand his reasons—he has plenty of them and I don’t understand them.”

  “But surely you’ve not given up hope yet,” Farida said, “it’s too soon to talk of….” Her voice trailed off. We watched Yasmin break down silently, large tears flowing down her cheeks. Farida went and sat beside her, poured her a glass of water. “Pray for him,” she whispered. “We will, too.”

  “You must come and give him chhanta … now,” the grieving woman answered, wiping away her tears.

  The three of us drove to Sunnybrook Hospital, Farida going with Yasmin in the latter’s car.

  Trust Karim Bharwani to pose a conundrum such as this one. Always the oddball, always the one with the dissenting opinion: why this way and not the other? Because the world is so, eh chodu, we would laugh him off. There were times when we vilified him, mercilessly, and tried to ostracize him, when he had wounded our pietistic feelings with one of his poisoned utterings. But he was too much one of us, you might as well cast out a part of your body. Now here he was, saying cremate me, don’t bury me. The trouble is, we don’t cremate our dead, we bury them, according to the Book, the same way Cain first disposed of his brother Abel.

  I wanted to say to him, as I saw him, Look, Bharwani, this is not the time for your smart, sceptical arguments. This is real, this is how you leave the world; at least this once, walk along with the rest of us.

  He had been washed. His face was flushed, but creased, and he looked exhausted and frail. He had always had rather prominent eyes behind big black-framed glasses; now his eyeballs were sunken deep inside their sockets, where two tiny black pools of fire burned with fervid life. There was barely any flesh on the cheeks. He reminded me rather of a movie version of an extraterrestrial. He said, in answer to his wife’s concerns, that he had been taken for a short walk; yes, he had eaten a bit of the awful food, to keep his strength; and today the pain was less. He would die for a curry; he attempted a laugh. He sounded hoarse and a little high-pitched. He had let an arm drop to the side of the bed; I picked it up, cold, and squeezed it. “Ey, Bharwani, how are you?”

  “It’s been a long time,” he said, meaning presumably the time since we last met. He smiled at Farida, who had gone and sat at the foot of the bed. “Mukhi and Mukhiani,” he said to the two of us, with an ever so slight mock in his tone, “so have you come to give me chhanta?”

  I threw a look at Yasmin, who turned to him with large, liquid eyes. “Let them,” she pleaded. “In case. It’s our tradition.”

  He said nothing for a moment, apparently trying to control himself. Then, in measured tones: “Doesn’t it matter what I believe in or desire for myself?”

  S
he had no argument, only the desperate words of a beloved: “For my sake….”

  He fell back exhausted, closed his eyes; opened them to stare at me. I saw my chance then, in that helpless look, and drove home my simple argument: “Karim, it can’t hurt, whatever it is you believe in.” With a laugh, I added: “Surely you don’t believe you have nothing to ask forgiveness for?”

  He grinned, at me, at his wife, and said, “You have a point there.”

  I proceeded with the ceremony, having brought the holy water. When we had finished, he joked, “I should go to heaven now.”

  “You will go to heaven,” Yasmin said happily, “when the time comes. But it was only a formality now.” She smiled and her look seemed to drench him in love. “And you’d not asked forgiveness from God in years.”

  “But I asked forgiveness from you, not from Him.”

  “Oh.” But she was not bothered.

  “But I am firm about the other thing, I tell you. I insist. These two people here are witnesses to my wish. I would like to be cremated when I die, not buried in that cold ground at Yonge and Sheppard called Immigrant’s Corner.”

  “But why, Karim, why?” For the first time, her voice animated, passionate.

  “Because I want it so.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “What difference does it make? I’ll be dead. Doesn’t it matter to you how I want to be treated in death, what I believe in?”

  She wiped away tears, looked straight at him and said, “All right. But I’ll have the prayers said over you by Mukhisaheb. A proper service.”

  “All right, Shamshu can say his juju over my body—if they let him.”

  He knew it would not be a simple matter fulfilling his last wish. And so for him I was a godsend, a witness to that wish who had known him in the past and was not unsympathetic, and who was also a mukhi, with connections. He also used the presence of me and my wife to extract grudging acquiescence from his own wife. There the matter stood when Farida and I took leave of the couple in the dingy, eerily quiet hospital room, our footsteps echoing hollowly down the long, white corridors. We both believed there was time still, for Bharwani and Yasmin to wrangle further on the issue, for his other close family members to be brought into the discussion, for him to be pressured into changing his mind. Cantankerous Bharwani, however, died suddenly the following day, bequeathing me such a predicament that it would seem as if I was caught inside a maze from which there was no exit.

  Once a death reaches notice of the community organs, as somehow it does almost immediately, the funeral committee goes into high gear. Cemetery management is requested to prepare the next available site, the body is sent for ritual washing and embalming, the funeral date is set and announced; relatives in different cities in the world learn about the death within hours and arrange for services in their local mosques. This is the way it always is.

  “What should I do,” Yasmin said to me over the phone from the hospital. “They have taken over, and I don’t know what to say to them….”

  If I had said, Nothing, she would surely have been relieved. It is what I felt strongly inclined to say—Do nothing, let them take over; he’s dead anyhow, it won’t make any difference to him. But it does make a difference to us, the living, how we dispose of the dead.

  Does that sound right?

  “What do you think you should do?” I probed her gently.

  “My conscience tells me to follow his wishes, you know I promised I would. But I don’t know what’s right. I don’t want him to go to hell or some such place because of his arrogance. Is there a hell, Mukhisaheb? What exactly do we believe in?”

  She had me there. I had learned as a child that hell was the name of the condition in which the human soul could not find final rest in the Universal Soul; in that case the body was simply useless and disposable baggage. I was also told of a Judgment Day, when the body would be raised, and of a heaven where you had a lot of fun, presumably with many pretty young women, and in contrast a hell where you went to burn for your sins while giant scorpions gnawed at your guts. I was inclined toward the more sublime approach to the hereafter—though who has returned from the world of the dead to describe conditions there? It seemed a safe bet simply to follow tradition, to go with the blessings and prayers of your people. But mere tradition was not enough for Karim Bharwani; he liked to make up his own mind. He had never played it safe. How were we going to send him off, and into what?

  I didn’t answer her question. “Your husband has put us into a real quandary, Yasmin,” I said instead. “Give me some time to think. Perhaps we can delay the funeral by a day, let me try and arrange that.”

  “His family has already started arriving, for the funeral … it’s a big family … two brothers and two sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles, and his mother. What am I going to say to them?”

  “Say nothing for now.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done without you, you truly are a godsend.”

  Isn’t that what I was supposed to be? But I found myself confounded, I didn’t know what to do, where my duty lay.

  I called up Jamal and Nanji, two other classmates from way back, to talk about “Communist” Bharwani’s death, and we reminisced some. It was the first death to strike our group from school, not counting a tragedy in grade eleven, when a friend was hit by a truck. They told me that Alidina, Kassam, Samji, and perhaps a few others would also be arriving, from out of town, for the funeral. Bharwani was lucky, so many of his former classmates would be present to pay him their respects. Would he appreciate that? We believed so.

  He was always intense, always controversial. Broad shouldered and not very tall, he had a habit of tilting his head leftward as he walked. He parted his thick black hair in the middle and, even more outrageous for the time (this was high school), wore suspenders to school. He spoke English with a twang that made people laugh, for its foreign imitation, until they heard what he was saying, which always seemed profound. He was our star debater and actor. One day he brought in a four-page indictment of God, obviously culled from books of literature, and presented the typescript to our hapless religion teacher, one Mr. Dinani, who broke into tears and called Bharwani “Lucifer,” which thrilled him ever so much. Mr. Dinani lives in Scarborough now, an insurance salesman recently awarded a plaque by his company for record sales. I lost touch with Bharwani when he went to England for university. When I saw him years later in Toronto, he seemed distant and perhaps even a bit disdainful; I gathered that my vocation as a real estate agent and my role as community worker did not meet his standards of achievement.

  That night there was the usual sympathy gathering of family and friends, after services in my mosque, where I met my former classmates, six in all. Yasmin sat in the midst of the large Bharwani clan, beside her mother-in-law, a severe-looking though diminutive woman with hennaed hair furiously and silently counting her beads. Mr. Dinani too was present, and in his familiar, overwrought manner, was already in tears. But my former friends and I gathered afterwards at Jamal’s lavish house on Leslie Street and gave ourselves a great reunion party, at which we remembered old “Communist.”

  Alidina, a heart surgeon in Kingston, recalled how Bharwani used to read and edit his English compositions at school. Once a small guy, fondly nicknamed “Smidgin,” Alidina was now simply broad and short, a recently divorced man turned out in an expensive suit. According to a rumour I’d heard, he had been accused by his wife, at a reconciliation hearing, of almost strangling her. His imitation of Bharwani’s arrogant manner was predictably hilarious. Nanji gave us a story the rest of us had never heard before. Late one afternoon, after classes were long over, while he was walking along a corridor he had chanced upon Bharwani and the new chemistry teacher Mr. Sharma sitting together in a classroom at the teacher’s table; Mr. Sharma was in tears and Bharwani was patting him on the hand to comfort him. What to make of that? Bharwani with a tender heart was not an image we were familiar with.

  T
he stories wove on, recalled after many years, inevitably embellished; the evening wore on, a good portion of the people getting progressively drunk, sentimental, louder. At these moments I always find myself adrift in my soberness. I debated briefly with myself whether to let them in on Bharwani’s last wish, but decided the moment was not quite the right one to request intelligent input from my friends. I left, taking my secret with me, though I could not help warning Jamal in somewhat mysterious fashion that I might need his legal advice on a serious matter. As I drove through Jamal’s gate, the question of the funeral seemed ever more urgent. Time was short. Wouldn’t it be better just to let things be, let the burial proceed? No one would be the wiser, but for Yasmin, Farida, and me.

  Messages were waiting for me when I arrived home. In one, I had been confirmed to preside over the funeral ceremony, which according to another message had been postponed from the next day to the one following, as I had requested. There was a frantic appeal from Yasmin—Please call, any time.

  “I met with my in-laws today, to discuss procedures for the funeral ceremony,” she told me when I called.