by M G Vassanji
Even though she had grown fat, there was still an attraction about her. There was that friendliness, the soft-heartedness, and the sense of humour. Those breasts were still ripe mangoes and the large hips were yet firm. But she did not let him come close. Blocking his attentions, in bed, turning against his desires that mountain of a haunch, behind which he felt rather helpless and small. Do you want me to come from behind? If you want to. With this Kilimanjaro facing me? Go to sleep.
Zera was married to God, the idea of God. Not that she was otherworldly or excessively devotional. Her obsession was to discuss God and religion, and she liked nothing better than to sit at the feet of her teacher, Missionary, and to hear him discourse on God, the Prophet, the sages. A little like listening to expert commentary on sports. If there was any devotion, it was to the Master. There had been in the past, on one or two occasions, innuendoes at this unhealthy worship of Missionary by his female followers. Nurdin knew his wife, not to say Missionary, and was never bothered. And, after all – thinking back on those innuendoes – who could know the innermost secrets of the heart, even if they were your wife’s … or husband’s … or your own.…
They had not been physically really close for years. Not had sex – what a nice legitimate way of putting it. He had resigned himself to this celibacy. There was so much to do, to worry about. And now this late reawakening, a blossoming in middle age of a youthful obsession. Will it pass? He shuddered, felt the almost physical impact from the steely eyes he knew were staring at him from the picture on the wall – should I let it pass?
Romesh had observed it. Romesh with the roving eye had observed his roving eye, and his shyness with women.
“That big wife of yours not letting you have it?”
It rather shocked Nurdin at first, this open remark about his wife. “She is very pious, very religious, you know.”
Romesh had a simple solution, an idea Nurdin was not quite ignorant about, especially in his youth. So he tried just taking her one night, but she had given such a scream, a yelp, that Fatima and Hanif came running, Fatima lumbering in the lead. Zera did not help him with explanations, she let him go to sleep with the knowledge that the kids already guessed what had happened.
To be young in this land free of inhibitions. What did he care of morality, can you change the way the world is going? He regretted his innocent youth somewhat. Once, when he was a boy, the picture of a beauty-contest winner had been printed in the newspaper, a white girl in a swimsuit, and they had all looked at it gravely in his home, at dinner, his father first. The picture had gone round the table. Then Nurdin had secretly cut it out and hid it among the pages of his exercise book. Later someone had removed it, he didn’t know who, presumably to protect him from his father’s wrath. In place of the picture of Angela (that was the girl’s name), there was the traditional peacock feather. That was the extent to which he had let his desire run away, more or less, barring moments in the bathroom. He wished sometimes he had gone fornicating with the boys in the alleys and byways, in the huts with Arab and African prostitutes. Or in the quarters where Indian women ran the same trade more furtively and at higher price. He had even accompanied his friends on such expeditions. All, or most, respectable men now. Like Jamal, who had done everything in his youth. Now he was respectable and rich. Then there was that Nanji. Difficult to make out what Nanji was. A Sufi, you would think, an ascetic. But he had spent three days – and, worse, nights – with three women, drinking and doing God knows what. Zera had not really approved, of course, in spite of her enthusiasm in fixing up Nanji’s apartment, though she had blamed not Nanji but the three girls. Pretty girls, all. Pretty and free.
Nurdin’s lusty eye, he had discovered, hovered not only on the ample but forbidden body of his wife – which God would surely excuse – but on practically all women, it seemed. Like a boy at puberty he had become aware of Woman, the female of the species, and he found her diverse and beautiful. And what was offered to an eye starved for such visions was simply breathtaking. It was like sending to the hungry of the world not just rations of wheat but whole banquets. Bra-less women with lively breasts under blouses and T-shirts that simply sucked your eyeballs out. Buttocks breaking out of shorts. And when you saw these twin delights nuzzling a bicycle seat, doing a gentle rhythmic dance of their own in the dazzling heat and among the trees and flowers and the smells of nature in the park – why, you had to be sure you were dressed right. And Zera marching along ahead. “Hurry up, Nurdin, stop loitering like a boy.” Boy, indeed. His head would be pounding, his body aching with desire.
Later, after witnessing such a vision, he would be overcome by bouts of guilt. The picture on the wall fixing him with its eyes, reminding him of that hymn, “Lust and anger, those two you shall avoid.” Anger was not his problem, that was his father’s. Let him pay for it. Nurdin’s problem was lust. Don’t covet another man’s woman. Well, what if yours doesn’t give? The punishment for backbiting was to be hung by your tongue, and for listening to backbite, to be hung by your ears. And for fornicating? A gruesome image of himself hanging by his balls intruded into his mind. He stifled a giggle. He didn’t remember who had listed those punishments, probably one of his father’s cronies during their interminable sessions. Hell will have scorpions as large as camels. And the sinful will cry in anguish, mercy, mercy.
One day Romesh and he had got out early from work, a little after lunch. It was election day. They stood outside, hands in their pockets, looking, feeling, small next to the impressive broad building from which they had emerged.
“Well, what do you intend to do for the rest of the afternoon,” Romesh said.
“Go home, I think.” The bus stop was a block away on Spadina.
“Tell you what, Nur. Let’s go for a walk.”
“Here?” A casual, aimless walk in the streets was not something he had done for a long time.
“Let’s go to Yonge Street.”
“Yeah, let’s go to Yonge Street.” He liked driving on it on Friday nights with the family, to see the gaiety and lights, and hear the noisy crowds on the streets and music at each corner. Pretending not to see the prostitutes in tight skirts and heavy makeup. He had walked on Yonge Street perhaps once. He could now see why. The daytime crowd made walking difficult. The street was littered and congested with noisy traffic, many of the shops were dingy if not outright disreputable. There was nothing much to see.
They sat down at a rather fashionable-looking outdoor café. “This is the life, man,” said Romesh with a sigh. “I could sit here forever, just watching the people go by.”
“And life go by, eh?” Sometimes he never knew how to talk to this man.
“And life go by, alas.”
The waitress was young and pretty, attentive. “Well, what can I do for you gentlemen today.”
“Plenty. But for now.… ” Romesh said with a grin.
Nurdin had a coffee, Romesh a beer. They sat and watched in silence. At work there was enough to talk about, they saw each other all the time, had lunch in the cafeteria together.
“Hey, would you like to taste my beer?”
“Oh, no.”
“There is nothing wrong with tasting, you know. From what I know of the Quran, only getting intoxicated is forbidden.”
Nurdin knew the argument. It was the latest among the educated Dar crowd before they too relented.
“You could have three or four beers easily without getting drunk.”
That Nurdin had also heard. “Let me try a sip.” His coffee cup was empty, in any case. He concentrated his mind on drinking that sip, so that it would not wander off and summon guilt from somewhere. That accomplished, he sat back and watched Romesh finish the drink. Finally he had a glass of his own, to accompany Romesh’s second. He did not know why he was doing what he was doing, did not think about it, though a vague consciousness of his deed lay somewhat heavily on his heart. The beer was refreshing, the bitter taste he got used to. His eyes were soon glazing over, he only hop
ed that no one walking by on Yonge Street would recognize him. They were sitting at a most conspicuous spot. The beer mug before him could not be mistaken for anything else.
“There’s nothing to see on Yonge Street, eh?” he said.
“Ah, if you want to really see something.… ” Romesh grinned. “Let’s corrupt you some more.” They got up.
They walked two blocks south to a part of the street where the pedestrian traffic thinned. They stood outside a place called Dar es Salaam, The Heaven of Love. It was a name you couldn’t miss – not if you came from a place called Dar es Salaam. The name of this heaven was printed on an oriental-style red canopy with a nude drawing to highlight it.
“Where do you say you come from, eh, Nur? This should feel quite like home to you.”
“What is it?”
“Follow me.”
Romesh went in, he followed. What promised opulence from outside turned out to be, inside, a narrow corridor: unswept, oil-painted yellow walls now grimy. On the walls some framed photos of nude girls, pubic hair conspicuous. There was a window just inside the entrance, from which Romesh got some change and counted half of it into Nurdin’s hand. “Enjoy. It’s all on me, man. All on me.”
There were six booths inside, two of them taken, each with a pair of viewers – like binoculars – to see through. You put a quarter into a slot – no, first you put your eyes on the viewer, instinctively, then you looked for the slot and put a quarter there, and you leaned forward on the viewer and pressed home the coin.
Nurdin’s heart pounded violently against a chest that seemed to have contracted. He had never seen anything like it, not in ads, not in movies, nor even the girlie magazines of his youth. Sex scenes beyond his wildest dreams: dirty, depraved, exciting – how much the flesh was capable of! It was enough to destabilize you forever, question all the inhibitions and prohibitions of childhood and youth – do this, don’t do that: who had thought them up? Reluctantly he looked up from the viewer, worked up to quite a state. He had used up all his coins.
As they were walking out two very young prostitutes in tight leather miniskirts stood around, vigorously chewing gum. “How about the real thing now, boys?” said one.
“Sorry. We are booked, ladies,” grinned Romesh.
“Fags.”
“Now to go home for the fun, eh, Nur. Why pay when you can get it free. Your big woman obliges now, I hope? My trick worked, I bet. What did I tell you. They like it.”
He went home oppressed with guilt. “What’s the matter, Nurdin?” Zera asked. “Oh, a headache.” He kept well away from her, his eyes averted, two cardamom pods in his mouth to sweeten his breath. To punish himself, he looked full square at Haji Lalani’s photograph, eye to eye. Do to me what you will: twenty-five, fifty, a hundred strokes of hippo-hide whip, dipped in salt. When he died, his father would be waiting for him with the whip, God’s personal executioner.…
They had gone to Montreal one weekend, in the car. All outings were prescribed by Fatima: “We don’t go anywhere.” Her outings with her friends were still strictly controlled by her mother, though she was beginning to break away. So to Montreal it was, on a long weekend, where they stayed at a motel owned by a family they had known in Dar. After doing the usual round of sightseeing, on the last day they had tea with Nurdin’s niece, the daughter of his elder brother, Akber, who had gone on to Belgian Congo, been looted a couple of times in the civil wars there, and had finally settled in Belgium. Only the most rudimentary correspondence had been maintained with him – marriages, deaths – and this latest from him: that his daughter was in Montreal with her husband and children. Naturally they were all excited at the prospect of meeting a European niece and cousin they had never seen.
The house was on an expensive-looking street, and in it they met the most graceful people, the kind in the old days you would have called “civilized.” His niece Nermine was tall and simply beautiful, in a long white dress, her hair braided and fashioned stylishly in what Nurdin was pretty certain was an African style: thin braids raised above the head, revealing a long elegant neck. Watching her your heart missed a beat. She spoke French, Dutch, and English, and a little very accented Gujarati. The two children, boys, spoke English with a most delightful French accent. The husband was quiet, attentive, in a red polo-neck sweater and immaculately pressed trousers. There was even a dog, who was locked away. The table they sat at, of solid wood, was covered in a spotless white cloth. On it were plates and silverware, some of which they didn’t know how to handle. The tea cups clinked brightly, calling attention. They all talked pleasantries, most of their attention taken in doing the right thing at the table. One thing he found out: his brother Akber had a diamond-cutting business in a town called Antwerp.
It was a depressing visit. They had come out of the house as grim as if leaving a funeral. Nurdin felt as he would have when walking out of the headmaster’s office with a sore bottom recently whipped, with an unpleasant experience never mentioned, best forgotten. Not that it was his niece’s fault. She was polite enough. But they had felt so out of place, he had felt like a bum, with his night watchman’s blue jacket, unpressed trousers, cheap boots straight out of Honest Ed’s. And the look he could see, feel, on Fatima’s face as she watched him eat and make conversation: Why am I not born to such elegant parents. And he himself, later, telling himself over and over, and to Zera: “Why step foot into a world in which we don’t belong?”
A world in which he didn’t belong? Wasn’t she the daughter of his own brother, Akber, who had been caned twenty-five times by their father for serenading a Hindu cobbler’s daughter.
His ruminations, having faltered from anxiety to frustration, found relief finally in a happy recollection, and he broke into a wry smile. It had happened one day at work and had been truly uncanny. A thunderbolt from the past.
12
He had been having lunch. The cafeteria at the Ontario Addiction Centre, not very big, at some seventy by thirty feet, is pleasant with many windows and plants and divides roughly at lunchtime into smokers’ and nonsmokers’ sections. In one the doctors and most of the administrative staff sit, and in the other, the rest.
Nurdin saw an Indian woman in a green sari, middle-aged, of medium height, slim though generously hipped. She walked past him with her tray and he stared. Romesh, sitting with him, also stared. You didn’t see many Indians here, and when you saw one, a middle-aged woman, you naturally felt curious and empathized. He stared long, he couldn’t help it. There were strong lines on her face and her hair was greying. She sat alone at a table by the windows and after her meal smoked one cigarette. She looked vaguely familiar, he thought he had seen her somewhere, perhaps at an Indian grocery store on Gerrard Street.
It turned out that she was a patient. And every day at lunchtime he looked at her.
“You fancy her?” Romesh asked one day.
“I tell you I’ve seen her somewhere. What’s she in for?”
“Smoking. Looks like one of her allowed daily smokes she’s enjoying there,” Romesh said. “I hear she’s leaving today.” Nurdin continued to look at the woman.
“You better find out quick if you want to know who she is,” Romesh added.
And Nurdin did. Because, after smoking her cigarette and crushing the stub, she turned sideways on her chair, lifted the hem of her sari ever so slightly to look at a shoe.
And he knew. She was the cobbler’s daughter, Sushila, for whom his brother Akber had been whipped senseless! Who had played with him because he was much younger, by five years, who had in fact even come to their house when Akber had gone. He was positive, elated at having made the discovery. Quickly, before she got up, he walked to her table. And stood there.
“How are you, Nurdin Bhai,” she said.
“You know – you recognized.… ” He sat down.
“You know, Nurdin Bhai, you stared so hard at me all these days, it would have been a wonder if I hadn’t noticed. You look the same.” She smiled.
&nb
sp; “Much older.”
“Of course, aren’t we all.”
She was a widow, with a daughter at university, and she lived a short distance away, above a store in Kensington Market. They exchanged pleasantries mostly, that day, exclaiming several times at the wonder of meeting again in such a fashion after such a long time.
“Come home,” she said finally, “even by losing your way sometime.” She used an old turn of phrase.
“We will, we will. And you come, too, with your daughter.”
All afternoon he was excited by the discovery, he couldn’t contain himself. He even told Romesh the story about her father Narandas who procrastinated over his customers’ shoes until they threatened to go elsewhere – a story which had fallen flat once with the manager of Eatons’ shoe department – and Romesh chuckled. “You had those kinds too, eh? So did we!”
Then he went home, saying nothing about his great discovery.
One afternoon, about a week later, Sushila returned to the centre to pick up something, and met Nurdin and Romesh. Actually she had come looking for them. Or Nurdin. She gave him her address – wrote it down for him – and invited them both to tea the following day. “It won’t take long. I’ll have it ready, just eat and leave. That’s the best I can do in honour of our meeting here. You found me out!”
As arranged, at five the next day Nurdin and Romesh stepped out from work and set off for Kensington Market. They walked fast, conspiratorially, as they might have as young boys on a secret mission, to an unpicked mango tree for instance. The apartment, as she had said, was above one of the fruit-and-vegetable stores. Mangoes were few and expensive here, so they settled for oranges instead to take upstairs.
The room they entered was unpretentious, unambitious. No wall-to-wall carpeting, TV console, glass-topped tables. The sofa was a creaky-springed chesterfield, on which they sat a little uncomfortably at first. There were two hard-backed chairs, a table in a corner on which were some books. The first instinct of the two men was pity for the poor creature who had still a long way to go, who didn’t as yet know how to live comfortably in Canada. But their hostess was cheerful and gracious. She wore a sari as before. As she had promised, the tea was waiting, and she had managed to obtain a variety of snacks. This first time the talk was small and hurried, a little guarded, a little awkward. This experience, two men visiting a woman alone in her home, was a novel one, for each of them. They talked of rents and prices. Romesh offered financial advice on savings. Nurdin told his cobbler joke once more and that eased the atmosphere somewhat. Sushila had had better luck than Nurdin at the shoe stores. She was finishing her high school diploma, she said, at which the two men threw a glance at the books on the table in the corner.