by Shani Mootoo
Love, Zain
You used that word—“love”—sparingly, but whenever you did I tortured myself, parsing what you might truly have meant by it.
Finally, there at the back of the cold locker, were the boxes of photographs. In one of them were photos I’d taken when I had first arrived in Canada. I could see in them that my eyes, which had only known one landscape before, had suddenly been bombarded by incomprehensible views, the unrecognizable shapes and colours of a far northern landscape. The photographs showed how, as I attempted to understand my surroundings, I would isolate some detail in the landscape, as if it were a trinket I could catch and examine. In a number of photos I had trained my camera on a coniferous tree from which icicles hung, the branches weighed down in glassy sweeping arcs.
Eventually, I found the two images I had come for. When you gave them to me you’d coyly refused to tell me who the photographer was. I still don’t know. I don’t need the photos in front of me now to recall them. I remember them by heart, just as I remember the notes you’d written. One of them was taken in your back yard. You are holding the hands of your two children just as one is about to jump into a little round concrete pool. Your long, shiny black hair is parted on one side, and pulled back. You seldom wore shorts because you thought your knees were “knobby”—your words—but in this photo you’re wearing red running shorts. And you have on a loose, pale yellow tank top that falls to your waist. Your hands are outstretched—Peter clutches one, pulling you to his side, and Aliya clings to the other, pulling you towards her. Aliya reaches you at your hips, and she wears only her baggy kid’s panty. Peter’s free hand is in the air as he readies himself to jump into the pool. The three of you are perched on the edge of the concrete, which is painted the exact yellow of your tank top. Your toes, the nails painted the same red as your shorts, grip the lip of the pool and the three of you look as if you’re about to tip into it. The children are gazing into the pool, Aliya with a grin so wide you can hear her laughter, Peter serious, his face contorted with the concentration of an old man. Your head is slightly dipped, to keep the sun out of your eyes, perhaps, but you’re looking up at the camera. I know your smile. It’s as if you’re saying “yes” and “don’t” at once.
Who took that photo, Zain? I never saw you look at Angus like that. Did you, once? If so, when did you stop? Was that a look shared only with him, or was the photographer someone other than Angus? The wading pool is set in a lawn. There are no flowers or shrubs, just the pool, and behind it a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence, it’s all sky, pale indigo darkening the edges of the photo, with a faint smudge of loose white cloud at the top centre. Given the distance between the three of you and the photographer I shouldn’t have been able pick out the fine hairs, like the wisps on a newborn baby’s forehead, that ringed your hairline, hairs that were always a little damp, but I could see them, Zain, feel the wet of them on the tips of my fingers that had time and again pushed them back. But it was your smile, the intense look at the camera, and by extension at the photographer, that made me tuck that photo away. Zain, when you gave that photo to me so many years ago, I felt as if I were being treated—as well as being subjected—to the gaze of that photographer. Were you trying to tell me something, Zain? Or were you trying to dare me too? I never showed that photo to anyone. It was a photo of my best friend holding the hands of her two children who adored her, but I wouldn’t show it to anyone. I hid it away in a box in my basement. That day before I returned for your funeral, though, I took it from the locker room up to my apartment.
The second photo had been cropped by hand into a ragged shape approximating a square, creating a bust portrait. I remember you handing this one to me. I had looked at it for a second, shy and a little confused, and glanced up to see you grinning mischievously. “I am wearing a maillot. You don’t see it, but I am,” you explained.
In the photo you are standing under an outdoor shower, the large lime-green leaves of a traveller’s palm fanning out to create the photo’s background. The showerhead can’t be seen, but it was opened full on you, your head directly in its spray. It is a full frontal shot and you are staring at the photographer, your eyes soft, your lipstick-reddened lips shining and slightly parted so that glistening water seems to fall between them, and then off your lower lip. Your right arm is raised, bent at the elbow, your limbs so long that the point of your elbow is well above your head. Your hand is obscured at the back of your head, out of sight, resting on your neck. Your exposed underarm is shaved, pale, smooth as the palm of your hand. Your black hair in this photo is pulled back, but looks as if it has been freshly groomed, with deep grooves that could only have been caused by the teeth of a large comb. Because of all this, and because the water spraying out of the shower tap hasn’t disturbed your hair, and the mascara and the kohl that thickly outline your large bright eyes haven’t run, the photo seems staged. The water from the shower hits your hair and each drop, or rather each dash, each smart dash, shatters like fireworks. The dashes of water reflect the green of the traveller’s palm behind you, and the blue slash of light with a pin-point of red. Water runs down your arm and your face, and drips off your eye lashes, your nose, lip, and jaw line. A shiny bead hangs off your elbow, with another in formation, in quick pursuit. I was uncomfortable when I first saw the photograph, Zain, but I managed a trembling smile and said, “That’s a great photo, nice shoulders.”
I still wonder, so many years later, who was the photographer, Zain?
The upturned fanned-out lines of the palm branch and the downwards spray of water, the deep grooves in your hair, that raised arm, the paleness of your underarm and, above all, the hand-cropping of the photograph are dizzying. Why is it cropped? What didn’t you want me to see? I was glad to have that photograph. I wanted to keep it to myself, to protect it, so that no one else might be stirred by the same questions.
After reading that section, I was compelled to turn to the following well-thumbed passage:
Zain, you were like a child wanting to be held. But you were not a child. You were a woman. Regardless of what I look like, of the body parts I have or don’t have, or of the crime that there isn’t another word, beyond male and female, to describe someone like me, I am not what you were. At least, that’s how I feel about myself and my place in the world. And even if it was true that you felt nothing as you lay at my side like that, your head on my shoulder, facing mine, my lips not an inch from your forehead, your breath like a feather moving back and forth on my neck, I can’t say I felt nothing. Far from it. You wouldn’t have dreamed of lying like that with a man unless you were in an intimate relationship.
I didn’t have to say it: you knew I loved you, and you probably even knew how, exactly, I loved you. Was it fair or right that you could lie so close to me and not expect me to fall and fall and fall for you? Was it right or fair to either of us that I indulged in such covert intimacies with you? At least I never let it come between us. Or did it in the end pry us apart?
Who killed you, Zain? Was it Eric, or was it, in some way, me? Are we—that word we making collaborators of the bastard and me—both guilty?
Oh, Sydney. This grief, this idea you have carried for so long that you were responsible for Zain’s death—how I wish I had known of it. I regret that you and I never discussed it, that I was never given the chance to allay your fears, tell you that you were guilty of nothing.
But whose fault is this? Should I not be the one who carries the burden of guilt—for bearing prejudices you knew you had to be wary of? Oh, Sydney, the silences you had to keep, the unspoken words that tortured you. Your body lies cold in a funeral parlour, but wherever your spirit lives now, hear my words: it is not you who is guilty.
12
Never before had I considered the concept of heaven. But on the day of Sydney’s funeral—another for which I had no precedent—my mind was wide open.
I was Sydney’s custodian—not of his body as it lay in his casket, but of the part of him that was no
t perishable. I wanted the impossible: to correct the misconceptions that had swirled around him when he lived, and to organize how he was to be remembered. To this end I prepared and practised my eulogy until I knew it by heart. Sydney’s two friends from the Baphomet group would speak first and then I would deliver a eulogy that would reveal what a compassionate and understanding parent Sid had been to me. I wanted to say how he and I had been apart from each other for many years but were reunited nine years ago and how in those nine years he had bared himself to me, and I had learned about his courage, his humanity and his unfathomable ability to love. I wanted to say that he was a hero to me, and an example to us all.
As I waited for the ceremony to begin I felt in moments like an angel, benevolent and fierce; in others like a child, unknowing and in awe; and in still others as if I were a divining rod that sought truth, like a fierce and fearless demon. And sometimes I saw my utter powerlessness, and I felt raw and ignorant. In those moments, I was unsure of everything.
The time arrived, and I stood on the veranda next to the open casket and Sydney’s body, garlanded and sweet-smelling. Before us sat a small gathering of about thirty people, including Gita and Jaan, who had arrived the night before. I looked at Sydney and then at the gathering. And I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
I cleared my throat and tried again.
I had no sense of how much time passed before a voice I did not recognize came out of my mouth. It said simply that Sydney had been the best parent anyone could hope to have.
The lineup of cars headed for the parking area of the cremation grounds advanced no more than a single car-length before stopping for several minutes, then moving again. This was the pattern and the pace for about a quarter of a mile on the road that ran parallel to the Caroni River.
We lost sight of Pundit’s car, and of Gita and Jaan’s, but I saw a hearse about five vehicles ahead of us and assumed it was “ours.” If Gita did not come to the cremation, I thought, I would be furious—and yet, I also did not want her anywhere near Sydney during those last minutes when his body was still visible to all. I turned to see if I might be able to spot her car behind us, and saw that Rosita had her hand on Lancelot’s on the seat between them. Lancelot had not spoken a word throughout the journey.
In the distance, three discrete plumes of grey smoke whirled heavenward. That I was to be the one to press the button that incinerated Sydney’s body still weighed on me. I was ignorant of the details of things to come, but after the small fiasco of not being able to speak earlier, I resolved to do whatever was required of me.
Sydney’s last hours in the hospital—after his only two visitors had left and he began to speak to me again about his life—came back to me then. I recalled how I had taken the relative vigour in his voice to mean that his condition was improving.
He had been telling me of arriving in the office at the Irene Samuel on that morning of the blizzard. But he did not begin with leaving his apartment or speak of the journey in the snow, as he usually did. Instead, that last time he had told me of his final minutes of consciousness as Siddhani Mahale.
He began his story at the point where Siddhani was in the surgery ward, and was handed a dark blue gown and ushered to the changing cubicle by a perfectly kind woman. The woman’s kindness had meant everything to Siddhani. She was aware, as she prepared to go under the knife, that she was all alone, and that when it was over, when she came out on the other end as a different being—as she had imagined she would—she would be all alone then too. She had stood motionless in the cubicle for several minutes, in a sort of confusion. What if she had found love here in Canada? she asked herself. What if she’d had an income, and a home with her own front and back yard, a garden with lilac trees and blueberry bushes in back, and peonies and roses and a mulberry standard in front—a place of her own, that is, one that had made her secure and comfortable? What if India and she and I had remained together as a family, a happy family? What if she’d had success as an artist and her work had been in important exhibitions, and her paintings were bought, collected and written about? What if in Trinidad she had seen that the mould in which women were cast could be broken, and yet women not themselves be broken? What if she had been told from a young age that it was all right for a woman to love another woman?
She removed all of her clothing and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror. On the verge of losing her breasts, it was as if she was seeing them for the very first time. Indeed, she could not remember ever having really looked at them before. Well, she had, but only when they were covered up with clothing—and then, to her, they presented an unsightly bulge that made her feel as if she were twice an imposter: once because she did not feel like someone who should have such appendages attached to her own body—they gave her no pleasure and she had no interest in them becoming anyone’s objects of desire; and twice because even when she took pains to disguise them—wrapping bandages about her torso, wearing sports bras that flattened her chest, donning clothing made of heavy fabric—whenever she caught a glimpse of her reflection what she saw first were her slight eyebrows, her full lips, her small hands and feet, her hips and thighs. In effect, she saw a woman with flattened breasts. She could not lop off her hands and exchange them for bigger hands. Nor her feet. Nor her hips and thighs.
Standing naked in the cubicle she had looked at her breasts, and she’d imagined them to be not her own, but the breasts of a lover. Had they been on someone else she would, she saw, have found them interesting. No, not simply interesting. She would have found them beautiful. She would have thought they were desirable. She’d want to touch them. She had never had a lover who was of her own race—or, for that matter, who was not white—and so she was pulled towards this new sensation in several ways. She turned one way and regarded her breasts, then turned another way. Her breasts were pale, creamy. They had not the slightest blemish. Unused was the word that had come to her mind. They were unused. They were new. They were virgin breasts. The nipples, she said, and then corrected herself: her nipples had reminded her of a nectarine seed. She put her hands beneath her breasts, and imagining them again to be those of a lover, she cupped and lifted them so that she could feel their weight. They sat in her hands like small cakes that, had they been on her lover, she would have set her mouth to. She lifted them and ran her thumbs over the nipples, her nipples, and it was the first time that she had felt such a sensation. She would not cry, she told herself. Naked, she sat on the bench in the cubicle, her heart sinking, her courage waning. She looked at her breasts and admitted that it was odd to remove a couple of large, healthy chunks of herself, parts that were alive, parts that had not been compromising her physical health and were, she suddenly saw, beautiful. In a few hours these two parts of her body would be gone. She saw them in her imagination, set carefully down by baby-blue latex-covered hands, into a pale blue bucket that sat on the floor. They were cut off from their blood supply, and had begun immediately to wither and die, to rot. She thought of her first big love, India Lewis-Adey, of when she and India had first met and there was that crazy, delightful thrill between them. And then she recalled India telling her that she had to leave. And, finally, she thought of me, the child she had brought up and had loved.
Siddhani knew, Sydney told me, that she could have changed her mind about the surgery. There would have been a fee to pay, naturally, but she hadn’t had to scrimp and save for the money. She thought of Zain pressing the bills into her hand. She had a choice, and this was her last chance to make it. And then she was overcome at the sudden memory of sounds outside the guestroom door as Zain had lain in her arms—sounds of footsteps quickly taking the stairs.
She remembered lying on the narrow table, imagining her reconstructed chest, picturing herself walking up Parliament Street—why Parliament Street she couldn’t really say, but there she was walking on it—in an ironed blistering-white dress shirt and blue jeans. She had all along refused to take injections of hormones to affect
a greater change in her appearance, but just as the doctor lifted the syringe into the air and told her to count backwards from ten she resolved to start the hormone therapy as soon as she was able to. Instead of counting from ten, she imagined herself in that white dress shirt—no need to bind her breasts—and those jeans, and even though she knew better, she saw herself taller too. She was already more lithe, she was already feeling new confidence. And she went under smiling.
The kurta and pants I wore bore no pockets, so I carried with me a small cloth shoulder bag in which I had placed my wallet with my ID and Sid’s three notebooks. I had brought them along, intending to place them in the coffin before it was closed and taken away. The bag lay on the seat of the car beside me. From the bag I removed the last of the notebooks and turned to Sydney’s final entry. I knew it well, but I scanned it, my eyes lingering on the lines: And yet, ten years later, when we broke apart, I hadn’t stopped loving her. Farther on, I read, and held on to the words: I could not bear to say goodbye to Jonathan and so I did not. And towards the end of the entry, I read the words I had wished, on every reading, that I’d had the chance to respond to: How do I explain it so that he doesn’t think I ran away, gave up, failed?
I tore out the pages of that entry and folded them so that, tucked into my wallet, they fitted neatly and safely. I put the notebook back into the bag and drew the bag close to my body. I kept one hand on it, feeling the shape, the weight, the size of the diaries it held.