by Shani Mootoo
I managed to find e-mail addresses for every Sid Mahale whose profile glancingly resembled that of my Sid’s, and over time I wrote letters of inquiry to them all and kept my fingers crossed. To my surprise, all my letters received responses, but invariably they ended with the hope that I would soon find their namesake.
My Sid Mahale was Trinidadian, had immigrated to Toronto more than forty years ago, and was a visual artist—a painter. I eventually found an announcement on the Internet for an exhibition of paintings by a Sid Mahale at a gallery in Queens in New York, and bought a plane ticket there. As I recall this now, I am impressed by my own recklessness and the utter hope contained in that impulsive gesture. On the night of the opening I arrived at the so-called gallery, a narrow and claustrophobic living room, to find that this Sid Mahale was a thin young woman in her second year at art school. Her family was Ugandan and she knew no Trinidadians with the same surname. I bought one of her smaller paintings for a hundred and seventy-five dollars.
At the time I had no idea if my Sid had remained in Toronto, was still working as an artist, had gone elsewhere in Canada or to some other part of the world or had returned to Trinidad. For some reason Trinidad was the last place I looked; it only occurred to me to do so when I didn’t find her in Toronto, in New York or elsewhere. I certainly didn’t rush here. Hindsight suggests that in spite of my obsession with my search, I must have chosen to spin my wheels. Perhaps I knew in the depths of my being that it would be difficult, and possibly more painful than it was worth, to reconnect with a parent who had left me without word and had never made any attempt to be in touch. And so, after a while, the search degenerated into the idea of the search, and for a time it was my romance.
Sometimes there are elaborate calculations that lead to action, and sometimes there is no cognition, just action impetuously taken. For me, it was as simple as awakening one morning nine years ago and knowing instantly that I would go to Trinidad. There is no point in attempting to find a deeper understanding; I was simply and truly ready.
Thirty years or so ago, my mother, Sid and I had visited Sid’s parents’ house in Trinidad. That was the true first visit to the island for me, and it had taken place one year before the dreadful split-up. On the morning nine years ago when I bolted awake with my new resolve, I remembered that the Mahale house was in a small town called San Fernando. In the Google search box I typed “Sid Mahale San Fernando, Trinidad,” and a message came up asking if I meant “Sydney Mahale San Fernando, Trinidad.” I decided to try again. Sid’s father was a doctor, but I didn’t remember his first name, so I typed in “Dr. Mahale” followed by “San Fernando” and “Trinidad,” and up popped an obituary from a newspaper. And there in the obituary I found Sid’s full name: Siddhani. My heart pounded in excitement. I wrote “Siddhani Mahale San Fernando Trinidad” and a message came up asking again, “Did you mean Sydney Mahale San Fernando Trinidad?” On the link for Sydney Mahale San Fernando Trinidad there was no image to search under, but knowing that Trinidad was a small country and remembering the joking between Sid and my mother that all Trinidadians were related or knew each other, I thought that this Sydney might know of my Sid. It crossed my mind that I might discover this Sydney Mahale was, like myself, one of Sid’s sons. If so, he might be, I supposed, a real son. The real son. This caused some jealousy, I’ll admit. But he’d be a brother of sorts, too, I reasoned. I had liked the island as a child and I was already consumed by the idea of a trip. Perhaps I would be lucky, but if not, the trip would not be wasted; I had always felt an affinity for the place, and I could spend a week in Trinidad doing a bit of writing, hiking in the Northern Range and looking for the places I’d visited during that long-ago childhood trip, and perhaps I could attach to this another week in Tobago snorkelling.
The telephone book in my San Fernando hotel room was not an inch thick, and included residential and business numbers. It could not have been easier; while there was no Sid Mahale, I did find Sydney Mahale. I picked up the receiver several times to make the phone call, but decided, instead, to take a taxi to the address in the phone book.
Sydney Mahale’s house was not, as I had expected, in the south of the island, but in the northwest. A man I would later come to know as Lancelot met me at the gate and asked whom he might tell Mr. Sydney was there to see him. I gave him my name, Jonathan Lewis-Adey, but added that Mr. Mahale might very well not know of me. I waited for what seemed like an eternity before the same man, Lancelot, returned and unlocked the gate’s three padlocks. He pulled open the gate and invited me in. Halfway up the yard an older gentleman with an unsteady gait approached. It dawned on me that this was Sydney Mahale, and I realized at once that a person of this age could not be a child of Sid. He and my Sid were very likely of the same age. The gentleman and I looked at each other and I made the gesture of offering my hand in greeting. But before I could understand what was happening, my heart heaved. The eyes. I knew them. The smile. It was not a resemblance. The smile was the same. I was overcome by a dreadful panic. I could hardly breathe. Sydney Mahale did not shake my extended hand, but pulled me to him. I went like a child, and although I was a great deal taller than I had been when I was ten, I pressed my head to the shoulder of this person, once a mother to me, and I cried, like a child.
That was nine years ago. On finding Sydney Mahale, I had encountered not the parent who had from the first day of my life loved and understood me better than anyone else, including my mother, but a stranger who confounded and challenged me. Still, I came every year from then on to be with him, sometimes more than once a year. I would often stare at Sydney, baffled that inside this unfamiliar being resided the fullest picture, the fullest comprehension of who I had been as a child. Sydney’s voice—like that of a pubescent boy, incongruent in a person of his age—the angularity of his body, the thinned hair and receded hairline, the coarseness of a face whose skin I remembered from my childhood as being silky—there was stubble on it now from the shaving—and the pungency of his skin, were a wall between the person I remembered and once adored, and the relationship I had expected to reignite. It took time, desire and patience on both our parts before I could see that while the material, the physical form of the past as I had known it had changed utterly, the heart of it was steady and true.
———
Nine years later, all has changed.
It was reasonable, on this current visit, to expect that there would be no beach limes, no crab hunting on the east coast, no Scotch drinking in the thick and foamy surf late into the salty night, no evenings skimming the obsidian waters of the swamp, scarlet ibis drifting inkily against the slanted sky. As it turned out, lowering my expectations that this would be a visit without the glow of a vacation was the least that would be demanded of me.
Outside the airport’s terminal building the humidity, the heat, the incessant percussive and tinny steel-drum music that welcomed visitors, the crowd of passengers and their waiting family and friends were suffocating. How I wished that time could be reversed, that this was my first trip looking for Sid.
Thankfully, I did not have to wait long for Sydney’s chauffeur, Sankar. Out of the chaos he slid, taking the bag from my hand, ushering me through the drizzle towards the car. I knew the drive past the capital city to the northwestern arm of the island well, and was prepared for the near-hour’s journey to the house in Scenery Hills; it would no doubt be riddled with drivers’ abundant infractions and death-inviting manoeuvres, traffic jams and, fringing the entire route to the house, dangerously situated vendors’ stands that offered everything from bundles of barely alive blue crabs to battery-run fly and mosquito swatters, to cellphone cases, to papayas and avocados the size of soccer balls. I was, by this time, no longer discombobulated by the constant chaos on the streets or the unfamiliar attitudes to time and to laws, by the unexpected politenesses and solicitations, the heat and the bugs, or the sugary, oily and fiery foods. I had, after all, travelled here close to twenty times in almost a decade.
Sydney was usually wheeled out into the garden by Lancelot at four thirty or so every afternoon, but this time he had waited for me to take him out. In the past, he would almost lift himself out of the chair, reaching his arms up around my neck in greeting, but today he remained sitting, his hands on his lap, turning them palms up for me to rest mine inside. He had indeed deteriorated.
I pushed the chair through the wet grass to the edge of the garden and positioned it to face the calming waters of the Gulf, grateful that Lancelot had telephoned me in Toronto to say that I should come down at once. I had been skeptical at first, given that I had rushed to Sydney’s side on two previous occasions because “Sydney take in bad-bad and only calling your name,” as Lancelot had explained. “If he come through is only because God so good he spare him, yes,” and therefore I “should come quick-quick.” So down I rushed. Of course, Sydney had pulled through both times. After the last trip, I had returned home to Toronto thinking irritably of Lancelot as the nursemaid who cried wolf. But when he’d telephoned this last time, something compelled me to drop everything and head to the airport. Perhaps it was Lancelot’s unusual restraint, and his use of standard English. “Mr. Sydney isn’t doing too well,” he said. “He is weak. We are a little worried. If you don’t mind us saying so, Mr. Jonathan, we think you should come. If he sees you, he might pick up.”
The red-and-black plaid wool blanket I had foolishly brought Sydney the first time I visited was draped on his lap as if the air were as chilly as a late fall Toronto evening. I am still embarrassed and amused by my own prior ignorance; knowing more now, I think of stories I’ve heard about aid agencies battling the after-effects of disasters in tropical countries, appealing to well-meaning people from colder climes—like my old self, I suppose—not to make donations of duvets, wool blankets, fur coats and the like. But Sydney used the blanket right up until the end. I don’t know if it was because it suited his actual needs or because it was I who gave it to him.
That evening, Sydney didn’t hold my hand like he usually did. He wasn’t able to. His remained in mine only because I gripped it firmly. His skin was cool. It had become thin. I tried, and I certainly hope I succeeded, not to show my utter terror at how he had weakened and aged since I was last here. The thick gold bangle I have always known him to wear, a bayrah it is called here, seemed too large and far too heavy for his slender wrist. The sea ahead shimmered gold and onyx, and the sky, shot across only minutes before with wispy tails of gold-dappled airplane exhaust, soon turned bloody brown. We sat watching the light play on the sea, both of us quiet. Everything seemed, at once, dire and ultimately of no consequence. What words dare be spoken, sentiments expressed, in such circumstances?
Save for the screeching of parrots as they lumbered like stones through the air, the rustling of billowy stands of bamboo in the hills behind us and the passage of the occasional car below, it was a quiet evening. Time seemed to collapse, and once again I found myself acutely aware of my surroundings. I stored in my memory details of the view, of the scents and sounds, and at the same time my mind leapt forward in place and time, imagining looking back on the moment we were in. Then, quite contrarily, I thought of Toronto, of how cold it had been when I left that morning, so cold that I wore my leather jacket to the airport and left it in Catherine’s hands as we said goodbye on the sidewalk outside of Terminal 3. Such cold there, I thought, and here such suffocating humidity—the extremes available to a person in a single day. Poor Catherine, I thought, too, and immediately wondered if it was fair to pity her and yet hold on to her. She had come to know that whenever I visited Sydney I was leaving her in more ways than one. And then I realized that in thinking of Catherine I had squandered precious moments with Sydney. I focused my mind and squeezed his hand.
He cleared his throat. I found myself saying lightly that his skin was a bit dry and that next time I came down I would bring him a good hand cream. He nodded. Ahead of us, the iron bulk of oil tankers faded rust-orange rode high and leaned back as they awaited cargo from the oil refinery to the south. From the refinery’s harbour—an iron and asphalt archipelago in the Gulf—danced tiny points of orange flame that intensified as darkness descended. Lights on the lower decks of the cruise ships had lit up as we sat. The staccato sound of a police siren floated upwards on a breeze, followed by the monotonous two-tone siren of an ambulance. Sydney pulled lightly at my hand. I stooped at his side. In a low voice he asked how I was getting along with my work. I told him that I’d written a few small pieces for magazines. He asked more directly, had I been able to make headway with the writing of short stories or a novel? He must have known that I was not telling the truth when I said, “Yes, yes, I’m working on something,” and elaborated no more.
He merely nodded again. Then he advised me that he had spoken with the pundit who would officiate “at the end.” I chastised him, gently of course, saying that there was no need for such thinking, no need for such talk, and that once we were back inside the house we should telephone his doctor and request a house call, and that I was sure that he would in no time feel better. He let me ramble, but when I finished he was firm. Whether we liked it or not, he said, the conversation had to happen, and what would make him feel better right then was to know that he had said what needed to be said, and that I’d heard him.
I felt suddenly weak, and my tongue seemed to swell inside my mouth, stifling my words. The chugging of fishermen’s boats grew louder and voices drifted our way. In my mind waxed an image of the market at the wharf in Port of Spain, a vendor’s stall there, and on the counter deep trays of shaved ice that cradled plastic bags of fish tails, bones and heads—eyes blank and lips parted to reveal rows of tiny teeth and hard, fat tongues. Sydney said something, but his voice seemed far away as in my mind I levitated. Like a dragonfly I darted off, and in an instant I was high above the King’s Wharf in Port of Spain looking down at the fish market, at beached pirogues, a cruise ship and the St. Vincent Jetty Lighthouse and the traffic circling it. I took off inland, around the humming towers and the wires of the city’s electricity plant and over the cemetery, and only when I arrived at the Savannah, above a bromeliad-laden, centuries-old samaan tree, did I come to a halt—truly in mid-air. I angled myself to make a nose-dive into a coconut vendor’s stand.
Sydney must have seen that I’d gone far away, for in his typical manner he sharply yet gently squeezed and shook my hand to bring me back to attention. Listen, Jonathan, he said. You must listen, please. He wanted me to take the lead in the ceremony, he said. I bore up quickly, and had enough presence of mind to speak around the thickness in my mouth, the lightness in my head. What would taking the lead entail? I asked. He brushed the question away with a gesture of his fingers, and said that Pundit would guide me through everything. My dread must have been evident, for Sydney said that I shouldn’t worry too much, that it was all quite straightforward. I was to take charge of his affairs, too, he said. He had left notes outlining it all. He said he wanted me to know that the house, this house here in Scenery Hills, would be mine.
This last was too much at once, too premature. I may have arrived expecting the worst, but now that I was here, in his presence, touching him and speaking with him, I was not prepared to let him go so soon. Sydney then asked if I would wear the bayrah that was on his wrist. I held both his hands in mine, and brought them to my lips. When I was a child, such displays of affection had been the norm between us, but during these last years we had not been physically close. During Sydney�
�s final days, however, nothing was as usual. If a script exists for such a time I have never seen it, and all that I had learned about how to conduct myself in the world fell away and had to be reinvented. Time and habits and ways shifted forwards and backwards and sideways, without reason. Sydney slid the bayrah off his wrist and tried to put it on mine, without success. I put it back on his wrist and our mutual distress was relieved with more laughter than the situation merited.
We moved inside the house as the last light faded. Sydney insisted he did not want the doctor. He wanted time alone with me, he said. His frailness in the lamplight appalled me, and, looking back, I have asked myself how could I not have seen that he was so close to the end? Still, I console myself with the thought that nothing about him indicated that he was anything but compos mentis, and perhaps I erred on the side of respect for his autonomy. Perhaps I should simply have heeded my own judgement and called for a doctor the instant I had arrived at the house. But there were things on his mind, things he’d begun to tell me and hadn’t finished, and he insisted he needed to tell me everything now, for who knew if there was to be another visit.
2
During my many previous visits to his home in Scenery Hills, Sydney would regale me with stories. He had once said—and I’m not entirely sure if he was joking—that if I ever ran out of stories to tell, the ones he was telling me would surely serve me well. Perhaps, I thought, but only if he told me what I wanted to hear. If he wasn’t telling me tales about his high school friend Zain, who had never left Trinidad, then he would tell and retell the story of a walk he took one early and snowy morning from his apartment in Toronto’s East End to a clinic in the downtown core. Over the years I had come to anticipate those moments when Sydney would squint at the mercurial sky and fix his questioning gaze on some site where was written, it seemed, these seemingly unrelated anecdotes. Sometimes, as one recounting went on, it would contradict previous ones. He would pluck out of the tome in the sky some memory of Zain or of that walk—the blizzard the night before, or the street worker who had tried to get his attention, or the overturned, snow-covered wheelchair in the neighbour’s yard—and resume whichever version he fancied. He had an astonishing capacity for recall and for detail, and in his penchant for digression he would often follow to great depth seemingly tangential threads that would be suddenly dropped, left hanging loose and frayed.