by Shani Mootoo
India’s story about that encounter began benignly, but, as was wont to happen with my mother, turned into a complaint about Sid: Sid could never quite get used to the fact that she had left behind her family’s posh life—such as it might have been in the Caribbean—when she immigrated to Canada. And worse, instead of employing the privileges of that background, which ought to have entitled her to say to fucking hell with what others think of me, she worried that people didn’t see her for who she felt she was. Before the visit to see Sid’s parents in Trinidad, India said she had assumed that Sid’s life in our house in Canada was far more comfortable than it could have been over there. Well, of course, my mother said, I saw in Trinidad that those people—third-world aristocrats, they imagined themselves to be—put on a bloody good show: they were not in the least discreet about their love of all things fine and morbidly expensive. It was in Sid’s bones for sure, India said, the sense that she had a right to it all. Then she thought about what she was saying and added, It’s a particular kind of taste, of course, typical of people in those kinds of colonized countries. They’re like magpies, able to home right in on the brightest and most beautiful things. India made the word things quiver. But poor Sid, she continued, Sid could not get used to what immigration does to people like her and me, people who, when we leave our families behind, also leave behind lives of luxury, of being served. Sid would not see that money was the least trustworthy aspect of class, that anyone could make money, and that those who came from it, those who’d had it in the family for eons, could still lose it. Sid, Sid, Sid. Poor Sid. She had no resilience, no tenacity. She could not in good humour take what this country offers to people like her.
India suddenly clapped her hands and laughed as she said, “But, dear Joji, what have I just remembered most vividly about Sid at the Elgin Bar? The bloody pen! A hundred years later and I can still feel the weight of the damn thing! She did have good taste; and she was, in those first flirtatious days, a wonderful lover—I’ll give her that! But, but, but. Once the flirtation was over we became different people, and I believe we both must have been disappointed. I believe you were our glue.”
Sometime after meeting Sid, my mother decided to get herself pregnant through artificial insemination. After India became pregnant, Sid was at my mother’s side, and God knows, my mother confesses, she was grateful for the company, the help, the concern, flowers, chocolates, boxes of Chinese takeout, garlic naans smothered with mango chutney. Sid was generous and something resembling a relationship evolved. They didn’t fall in love, India said, but rather into a relationship. In the fourth month of my mother’s pregnancy, Sid moved into the house in the Annex.
When I was born, the attending nurse wrapped a towel about me and handed me to Sid. Sid brought me to my mother, who said she would wait to hold me until I had been cleaned up. I know this because India told me. Sid’s willingness to take care of me allowed India to immediately throw herself back into her writing. When her book was published three years later, it was a finalist for three major prizes. She became busy with one event after another, with interviews, with touring the width of the country, and with travel abroad, and Sid and I became a team.
Knowing a little more now about Trinidadian families, especially those of Indian origin, I once asked Sydney if his parents had let him—well, importantly in this regard, her at that time—leave Trinidad and emigrate so far away without any opposition. His answer gave me another glimpse into what was going on with Sid before he and my mother met. Dad and Mum were angry, he said. There was a great deal of crying in the house in those days, he said. There was a lot of shouting between them and me. Dad assured me that if I left I would have to make it on my own, and for years he did not back down.
I was far away from the comforts I knew in Trinidad, and I had no skills, Sydney said, other than those of a painter. I didn’t tell Mum that I was struggling, but she knew in the way that parents always know what you’re not telling them. She sent me money without me asking for it, and without Dad’s knowledge. I was grateful, of course, but she thought she was sending it for the little extras. The truth is that I hadn’t wanted to do anything but paint. If you’d asked me if I wanted to be an artist, I would have said, No, I want to paint—for being an artist seemed to entail a kind of empty posturing, and living a particular kind of lifestyle, and I used to make a distinction between that and actually making the art, between that and doing the work. I assumed that all I had to do was work hard and well and honestly to make paintings and get them shown, and they would surely be sold, and I would be a success. My strategy was to work hard, painting day and night for a month, then for two months take on temporary work where there was the potential to earn good money in a short space of time.
Answering an advertisement on the notice board at the community centre where I used the gym, I found a job where I went out into the suburbs, from door to door, and sold the residents a government-subsidized program to increase the insulation in their homes. There was also a period when I sold vacuum cleaners in the same manner, and another time I sold books of coupons for discounted restaurant meals. I made enough money to paint unpressured for a full month. Then, when I had a body of work to show, I approached galleries. But I was told in vague terms that their mandate was to show work that was “more Canadian.” So then I delivered handmade cards into the mailboxes of houses in targeted areas of the city, advertising the sale of my paintings, which I displayed in my apartment. I aimed, on those open-house days, to make sales that would cover my apartment’s rent and utilities, and the replenishment of art supplies.
At this, Sydney stopped talking. I felt he had more to say, yet his lips pursed and he nodded as if to say, And that was that.
I had to ask, “And then what did you do?”
He answered with resignation and relief at once: Then I met your mother. From the moment we began talking in the bar at the Elgin, I was quite taken by her. We became friends quickly. One day, she informed me that she had, finally, after several attempts, become pregnant. Before you were born I moved into 191 Pellatt Green with the understanding that I would use the shed as a painting studio. When you were born, India was busy with the book she was writing, and you were like my own child. We were a family. A woman was hired to come in weekly to clean and do the laundry, and I painted and took care of you, Jonathan. I painted without a worry about whether the work was good or not, whether it was too Canadian or too something else. It was the first time I had worked without a worry. The work was good, of course; I wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. It took awhile—years, really—before I got a show, Sydney said. And to my utter surprise and delight—at least at first—it was reviewed. The review was long, too. But as I read it I realized that the reviewer didn’t know how to think about the work. She praised the quality of the painting, citing technical proficiency and an understanding of the art history. She focused on my Trinidadian background, and this added a little colour to her review. When she began, however, to compare my work to that of a Haitian painter, my heart sank. Her conclusion was that the work’s value came from its folksy, naive and crude qualities. I was devastated.
I did not tell Sydney then that I remembered that show. I was eight, and from the vantage point of the present I can say that I may well have detected already the friction between my two mothers, and for this reason I saw and remembered little things that are now meaningful as I try to piece together Sydney’s life and understand my own. But I interjected quickly to say that I had lately come across a number of Sid’s canvases, which were still stored in the basement at Pellatt Green. And, I said shyly, it was clear to me that Sid had been a very good painter. This was more than true, but what I could not find a way to say was how moved I’d been to see the paintings, for they seemed to offer a vibrant and vital window into his mind—the mind of an immigrant of colour in Toronto—in the 1980s.
Sydney’s face lit up at my words of praise. How strange to see him blush. For a moment I could not speak, for
I saw my beloved Sid in him just then.
It comes to me now that Sydney and I were sitting on the veranda as we talked that day, being indulged by his staff with food and drink. Rosita brought us hot little homemade treats as Sydney and I enjoyed the midday light and Lancelot topped up our glasses with orange juice. I asked Sydney if it had meant anything to his parents that in the early days, when he was still quite a new immigrant to Canada, he’d had exhibitions of his paintings. No, he said, this did not impress them. What mattered to them was the fact that he went to live with my mother. It mattered, he said, that I had gone to live in a woman’s house, that I had gone to be with her. It mattered then that I continued to pursue my art and was still not working at any sort of paying job. They accused me of living off this woman—your mother—and they were very upset about the nature of the relationship. They told me that what I was doing was dangerous, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what they meant by this. Try as they might, my parents also could not understand why Gita, younger than I, had done so well—she had become a lawyer, married a man who was also a lawyer, and with him had a son—and I, according to them, so poorly.
Sydney said that his parents asked him again and again why, in a land of so much opportunity, he couldn’t succeed. His parents knew many Trinidadians—among them whites, blacks, Chinese, Syrians and Indian Trinidadians—who had immigrated and married, who had children and jobs, and in no time owned their own homes, at least one car, and took holidays. They could only imagine that Sid hadn’t made a proper go of it because she’d had too easy a life with them, and now expected to have such a life elsewhere without working for it.
I listened carefully to Sydney, but a phrase I had first heard in our house when I was a child—Oh, Sid, you’re too sensitive—crept into mind. I heard these words in my mother’s voice and I fear that in that moment I felt the same impatience as she once had. But now I wonder: was it truly impatience with what India would have called “whining” or was it that I couldn’t bear to hear of the hardships Sid had faced?
I implored my parents to see that I needed more courage than most, he said, in order to surmount the difficulties inherent in being not simply an immigrant, but an immigrant who was also an unmarried woman, a woman of colour, a woman without family around her, a woman who did not look the way women were expected to look, who did not walk and talk and act like them—a woman by whom the majority of men were discomfited. The full significance of Sydney’s words—and the fact that he had referred to himself as a woman more than once—hit me. Sydney said that he hadn’t had enough courage, and that shamed him, even though his parents themselves had never been in a position where they had needed this kind of courage and stamina, and so they were unable to imagine what he—as Sid—had been telling them. He said, The fact is, Jonathan, it had not occurred to my parents, who themselves had hailed from comfortable circumstances, that Gita or I would need many skills to survive on our own. Our parents, for instance, never taught us about money. They had never imagined we would need to know how to acquire it or handle it on our own. And it is true that even as a young adult at home in Trinidad I had not understood that one worked for and earned money. Gita and I were encouraged to assume that we would never work for anyone. And so, in my parents’ opinion I was being needlessly contrary, and if only I would stop acting this way, I would do well. Eventually my father would have had enough and would slam down the receiver, and then my mother would call back and confide that she knew of men who were gay yet remained in Trinidad, who married and had families. They simply put a stop to all that nonsense.
As Sydney related all this India’s phrase returned to me, and played repeatedly: Oh Sid you’re so sensitive oh Sid you’re so sensitive oh Sid. Sydney carried on none the wiser.
By this time I had finished my drink and in the melted ice-water was suspended its remnants, a sludge of yellow cloudiness that looked like the uncooked white of an egg. Rosita had not come out to check on us, carrying more of her treats, for quite a while. She and Lancelot were usually aware of these kinds of things and responded without having to be called. Where are they? I wondered. At the same time I saw with mingled amusement and shame—a direct consequence of Sydney’s words—that I had fallen rather too easily into enjoying the comforts of a life with help who anticipated and fulfilled one’s needs before one knew those needs existed. I had not grown up with servants in our house in Toronto, but in her youth in England, before her immigration to Canada, my mother’s family had house staff that included maids, cooks, servers, groundspeople and a driver. I had to laugh at myself now, seeing how easily I had taken to life in Sydney’s house. I decided that I would simply wait for Rosita or Lance to come and refill our glasses. They would, sooner or later, I was sure. I relaxed and tried to focus on Sydney, who was still carrying on about the hardships of his early life in Toronto.
My mother would cry and ask, he was saying, why couldn’t I just do what was right, like those gay men she had known about: get married and have a family, for her sake at least. To which I would respond with a question of my own: was it fair to the wives that these men who preferred to be with other men, these men who were always looking at other men, and perhaps even secretly meeting with them, had married them? And she would say, “Well, that is true, I suppose.” A moment of pensiveness, Sydney said, would pass before Mrs. Mahale would say, “But …” and evoke loyalty to parents, to family, to society and finally to God. But what about those wives? I would ask again. And we’d go around and around, neither of us able to inform or convince the other. Of course, there was a great deal that I could not share with my parents—the ordinary details of my life, for instance the dilemmas I faced shopping for clothing that suited my idea of myself. How I would have liked to have my mother’s or my sister’s help in sartorial dilemmas rather than feeling their discomfort that I didn’t wear delicate necklaces or pearls or open-toed sandals with heels. And more urgently, I could not share with my parents or my sister the times when I was as high as a kite in love, or those occasions when I had a broken heart and thought that my world had come to an end.
This was not the first time that I had wanted to stop Sydney when he spoke like this, and say, But, Sydney, I am your family and I never pushed you away. Awash in the defensiveness that was so big a part of me in those days, I had ceased again to listen to him, indulging instead in an image of red dust whirling over waves in the mid Atlantic Ocean. I had recently read that at certain times of the year people on Caribbean Islands would find that a strange red dust had settled over their lawns, on their cars and porches, and in the louvres of the windows in their houses. The dust had been analyzed and found to be North African soil that had been blown all the way from the drought-ridden Sahel region and from dried-out Lake Chad. The dust must have risen in windstorms, I imagined, high into the air. Red clouds must have formed. They would have fastened themselves to currents of air that rolled off the land, and on meeting the Atlantic they no doubt rose even higher and swirled and swirled their way, over ten thousand kilometres or so of ocean, towards the Caribbean. I imagined the clouds arriving in these balmier climes and delivering their red cargo of sand, carrying unsuspecting bugs and worms. Reefs, I remember learning, were being destroyed as a consequence. I became immediately distressed that I had never in my life snorkelled. And in an instant I was energized by a new resolve: I would find out where the best snorkelling was off this island and see the reefs before they were no more. I would speak with Sankar that very day and ask him about snorkelling holes. Isn’t that what they would be called? Snorkelling holes?
Invigorated, I became alert enough to hear that Sydney had resumed the story of his walk. He was saying now that in the summertime, the noisy, firecracker-wielding people who lived in the dreadful house across the road stayed up for most of the night terrorizing one another and anyone in the vicinity. It was not until about five o’clock in the morning that they quieted down, he added, but they were never completely silent; even in the winter
, the terror they had wielded hung about their house like a thick fog. He tugged at his knapsack shoulder strap, he said, just to be sure that it was still snug.
Several cabs passed, Sydney said, although the sludge on the road held back their progress down the street. The sidewalk was icy and unevenly cleared. I had to wonder, he said, if walking was not insane. And I wondered, too, how I could feel so much trepidation, such impending loss, and be, at the same time, brimming with anticipation. I watched as a man dressed in cold-weather gear, hunched over a bicycle equipped with fat tires, laboured through thick brown slush, the water slapping alongside him, a dark skunk-line running up the back of his trousers.
Sydney paused long enough, I remember, for my attention to be distracted by the sounds of dishes and cutlery being handled, and cupboards being opened and closed in the kitchen, and hammering in the distance. This would be a good time, it seemed, to stand, to excuse myself and go in search of an activity outside the house. But Sydney had not finished his story. Staring into a faraway place and time, oblivious to what was happening around him, he added: I have to say that I was quite impressed; that man, the bicyclist, hadn’t been deterred by the snow and cold or conditions of the road. You see, he hadn’t given in and taken public transit, or flagged down a cab; he was clearly determined to get wherever he was going on his own steam, regardless of the weather. Is a man like that brave, or is he foolish?
Sydney turned and looked at me—for the first time in almost half an hour—and I realized that he was addressing me. But I had no words; I had understood that this was not a conversation and had not prepared myself to speak.
He saw my expression and said, Oh, Jonathan, you should stop me when I carry on like this. You look like you could use a nap. Why don’t you go in? Go take a little rest from this old storyteller. Put on the fan. I’ll stay here. It’s cool out here. Just ask Rosita to bring me a slice of sweetbread and a cup of coffee, please.