Outside People and Other Stories

by Mariam Pirbhai

  Corazon took stock of the kitchen and approved of her day’s efforts. Everything sparkled, and she was always pleased when the pine-fresh scent of the floor-cleaning product permeated the condo, like incontrovertible proof of a job well done. Corazon liked that expression: a job well done. It reminded her of Mrs. Hartman. “Since I’m rarely here to thank you in person,” she had explained, giving Corazon a box of pastries, “consider it my way of saying thanks for a job well done.” Since that day, Mrs. Hartman had started leaving a box of pastries for Corazon in the fridge every Monday. It gave her something to look forward to at the end of a long day. And Mondays were always the hardest, when she felt her children’s absence the most, as if speaking with them the night before only made things worse.

  Corazon scanned the contents of the fridge. Some days Mrs. Hartman left chocolate éclairs. Some days a colourful mix of frosted cupcakes that looked too pretty too eat. If only the Agency had sent me to someone like Mrs. Hartman all those years ago. Things would be different now.

  Corazon looked over the fridge again, hoping to spot a pastry box tucked somewhere in its recesses. Not once had Mrs. Hartman forgotten her little gift of something sweet. Corazon moved a dish of leftovers to the side, thinking that Mr. Hartman might have pushed the package to the back of the fridge by mistake. Then she took out a few of the larger items, including a bottle of mineral water and a carton of organic eggs, to search the back of the fridge. She came across several slender boxes stacked on top of one another, and took one out to examine it. Mrs. Hartman’s name was on it. Farther back she found a paper bag that contained several sealed syringes. Corazon recalled the day Mrs. Hartman locked herself away in her bedroom. She had been so focused on getting her job done that it never occurred to her that Mrs. Hartman might be sick, her mind now leaping to all kinds of morbid possibilities.

  Distracted by her discovery, Corazon gave up on finding her Monday treat and hastened to put everything back in the fridge. Focused on the task of ensuring the medications were placed in the exact place in which she’d found them, Corazon forgot to pick up the wrinkled photo of her children from the gleaming kitchen counter.

  ***

  Janet Hartman dexterously rummaged through her purse for her house keys with one hand, the other holding a large white paper bag filled with medications. How had it come to this? she asked herself, fighting back a tear.

  When she opened the door she was assaulted by the pine scent that usually lingered for hours after Corazon’s Monday cleanings. She hated the artificial scent but didn’t have the heart to tell Corazon. Today it was particularly overpowering. “I have to leave a note for Corazon to stop using that toxic product once and for all!” she mumbled crankily, dumping the bag of medicines on the console table in the foyer.

  Janet massaged her right temple as she dragged her feet to the living room couch. She had a splitting migraine after having spent the morning rushing to the clinic for another round of blood tests and ultrasounds, the usual protocol of daily testing that came along with every new cycle. The late afternoon sun refracted through the floor-to-ceiling windows. She shaded her eyes with the back of her hand to block out the view. She and Mark had loved spending their evenings unwinding with a glass of wine as they watched the sky turn pink and purple against the blues and greys of the North Shore mountains. Now she couldn’t look at the view head-on much less enjoy a glass of wine. It might interfere with the absorption of the medications, they said.

  She had made so many changes already. Loading up on herbal supplements. Cutting back on meat and dairy. Giving up her daily runs around Stanley Park for a more low-key workout. Rearranging her life around the rigorous testing as well as the injections she had to self-administer with clockwork precision at certain times of the day. She hadn’t even had the time to absorb the sobering diagnosis before she was thrown into an intensive treatment program, the likes of which even she, a medical professional, could not have anticipated. To make matters worse, the first cycle had ended in failure. Poor responder, they labeled her, because the dosage didn’t have the desired effect. Someone needs to give those specialists a lesson in positive psychology, she thought irritably. Poor responder or not, she was convinced she wasn’t that far gone.

  How could she have been so wrong? she wondered, her gaze fixated on the black and white photo of her grandmother on the top shelf of the built-ins. “If you want to continue the treatments we can,” the doctor had said with practiced indifference. They both nodded in the affirmative without so much as looking at each other. Did they want to continue? What choice was there but to continue? Janet felt a terrible pressure mounting behind her right eye. She had tried so hard not to indulge in worst-case scenarios. And yet here they were, facing the inconceivable.

  She reminded herself of her training. Of what she’d counsel her patients to do when they showed signs of hopelessness or defeat. It was one of the first five steps in the ten-step program outlined in her new book. The peer reviewers had called it a ground-breaking contribution to the field. Surely that was worth something.

  Close your eyes, she’d tell her patients. Turn away from the past. Then imagine a future uncluttered by present desires. Imagine something entirely new for yourself there. Janet closed her eyes, trying to move past the clutter. She remembered the day she won first place at the intramural Cross Country championship in her sophomore year. Running was the only competitive sport she enjoyed. She loved the singularity of the race. The sublime connection to one’s own heart, the only thing one could hear during the intensity of the run. The power of the mind in plain sight. How even the most transient thought could make the difference between reaching the finish line or stopping dead in one’s tracks. And the anatomy of potential. When every step expanded a muscle, contracted a tendon, redefined the contours of mind, body, and soul. All those years of training, of discovering the pathology of her stops and starts, had brought her to this point: the 42K marathon she had signed up to run in the fall. She was in the best shape of her life. Yet here she was with a fridge full of medications. Advised to pull out of the race. Too much strain on the body, they cautioned. “You don’t want to take any unnecessary risks, do you?” the Nurse had said, adding her two cents worth.

  Janet closed her eyes again, disappointed that she was falling into the trap she coached her patients to avoid. Stumbling through the clutter of the past. She willed herself to take a deep breath and try again. She remembered the first time someone referred to her as “doctor.” Doctor Murakami, as her patients and colleagues called her before Mark came into her life and she became Doctor Murakami-Hartman. How much she had wished her father were alive to see his daughter become everything he had wanted his son to be. If only he could have seen the name plate on her office door. If only he could have been there to celebrate the opening of her first private practice. Fully licensed and ready to un-do some damage, she had joked on the day she was to be handed the keys to her newly leased clinic. When she got there, Mark was waiting for her outside, grinning from ear to ear, an oversized red ribbon tacked onto either side of the locked door, and a bottle of champagne and two paper cups in hand. He understood what it meant: to be the first one in her family to have a bonafide profession—a Canadian professional with a Canadian degree.

  Janet smiled, the tension in her head and neck easing ever so slightly. The champagne reminded her of the day Mark proposed. Not because he had made a show of it. In fact, by his own admission the question seemed to be pulled from the sky, impulsively, if not a bit clumsily. Signature Mark, she thought.

  She closed her eyes again. They were driving home from her grandmother’s house. Janet wanted Mark to meet her before it was too late. How much she missed Grandma Emi, Janet thought, suddenly overcome by the various absences that seemed to govern her life these days. At least Mark got to meet her, she consoled herself. How smitten with her he was! So much so that she teased him endlessly about whether he was sure he had propose
d to the right Ms. Murakami. Janet learned more about her grandmother in those few short visits with Mark than in an entire lifetime of family exchanges. It wasn’t as if she was in the dark about their history. Everyone in the family looked up to Grandma Emi. It’s just that she had never opened herself up like that before, telling them stories that she had kept tucked away, so close to her heart, all these years. She had never talked much about what those early days in Canada must have been like, with a relative stranger for a husband and an equally daunting set of unknowns threatening to turn her into a stranger in her own eyes. Grandma Emi was never the type to kowtow to anyone, but to this day she wouldn’t take any credit for having made a success of the family business, even though Janet knew she was the one who balanced the books, who had the confidence to speak to the suppliers in English, who made sure they weren’t being cheated, who welcomed outsiders, and tripled their clientele.

  Mark proposed on the day of their third visit to Grandma Emi’s, a few months before she died. After they left Grandma Emi’s, Mark insisted they go for a walk in the park. He wanted to see the Cenotaph memorial, he said, remarking on how many times he had walked by it without pause. Like the government apology for the internments, it held little meaning for him. He wanted to see it with new eyes, he said breathlessly. Grandma Emi’s, he added.

  As soon as they pulled into Stanley Park, the rain came down hard. People walking their dogs or taking leisurely strolls ran to take shelter under whatever tree or awning they could find. She and Mark decided to wait it out in the car. A full twenty minutes passed and Mark was still blathering on about Grandma Emi. Asking her to fill in the blanks about her family history, about her grandparents’ return to Vancouver from Manitoba during the Repatriation period, a time about which even Janet knew so little because her mother had either repressed those memories or simply refused to grant her own children access to them. When Janet suggested they give up on the idea of a walk and go home, if only in the attempt to change the subject, Mark popped the question. Later that night when they were celebrating over a bottle of champagne, he said that the proposal just tumbled out of him, like the rain. Like the rain? Janet mocked affectionately. Could there be anything less unexpected than the Vancouver rain?

  Janet felt the pressure in her right eye resurfacing. How much had she done, how much would she be willing to do, to make this happen? No matter how hard she tried to visualize an alternate future, a space beyond the one outcome she longed for, she couldn’t.

  Janet closed her eyes again, sorting through the clutter, pushing it away. Her mind settled on the recurring fantasy of herself at a book signing, or the morning she would wake up to her name on the top of the Globe and Mail’s Non-Fiction Best Seller list. But the book was a done deal. She had written the last word, secured a contract, read and re-read the final proofs till three-hundred pages blurred into one. There was really nothing left to do but come up with a title. How had she let the manuscript sit on her desk, three weeks past the publisher’s deadline, agonizing over one minor detail? Why was she so hesitant to commit to something as meaningless as a title? She promised herself to settle on something catchy but sufficiently academic by week’s end.

  It’s time, she realized, looking at her watch and making her way to the kitchen. Taking out the syringe kit and medications from the back of the fridge, she placed everything she needed on the countertop, pleased that at least on Mondays she didn’t have to go through the additional step of disinfecting the counter-top since Corazon had already scrubbed it clean, a time-saving gesture not lost on Janet. Corazon wasn’t their first house cleaner but she had turned out to be their best, Janet thought, pleased she had listened to a friend’s recommendation to use one of those domestic workers’ placement agencies over the kind of exorbitantly priced maid services provided by the condominium board. Mark wasn’t a fan of anything that smacked of migrant labour, but eventually Janet’s “pros” had out-weighed his “cons.” She had won the argument to use the placement agency just as she had won the argument to start these treatments.

  Janet read the instructions again. “It’s the maximum dosage,” the pharmacist had said, far too ominously for her liking. Janet dismissed the remark. She needed to stay positive.

  After self-administering the injection, Janet sat down at the kitchen counter, resting her head against her hands to stave off a dizzy spell. A wrinkled photo caught her attention. It didn’t look familiar. It certainly wasn’t one of theirs. She would never let her photographs look so beaten up and worn out. Taking another look past the wrinkles and the blemishes, she registered an image of two children. They were standing in front of what looked like a dilapidated one-room house on stilts. The little girl was wearing a pair of knee-length blue shorts with a rather worn-looking Dora the Explorer T-shirt, and the little boy was standing with bare feet. Janet studied the photo more closely. She could make out the edge of a flowering banana tree at the left hand corner. On the right hand side, she could see a bit of the landscape behind the shack. It was a mess of the deepest greens in a mountainous terrain. Moving past the dense foliage, her eyes landed on an old woman in the doorway. She was smoking a cigarette and looking away. Then Janet let her gaze rest on the children themselves. There was something vaguely familiar about them.

  She turned the photo over to see if anything was written on the back, in search of some kind of verification in spite of the fact that the resemblance between mother and child was evidence enough.

  Corazon’s children. The words fell out of her like an indictment made for the benefit of the humming fridge and the elderly woman trapped in the image, her only discernible judge and jury. They seem so far away, she thought, following the line of one of the creases in the image with her finger.

  Janet stood up and felt the room spin. She ignored the sensation this time, her energy consumed by the weathered photograph. She grabbed it off the kitchen counter and opened the one drawer in the house left disorganized by design. A packet of picture hanging nails spilled its contents into the drawer when she yanked the box of envelopes crammed under it. She made a mental note to tidy it up later, as she freed one of the envelopes from the box and scribbled Corazon’s name on it. She did her best not to look at the photograph before placing it in the envelope—did her best not to let the sight of the children throw her off balance.

  She walked over to the console table in the foyer, looking for a spot where Corazon would be sure to see the envelope on her next visit, relieved that it was the week of her additional Friday cleaning. She settled on the jade elephant a friend had given them as a ten-year wedding anniversary gift.

  It would not do for Corazon to leave it behind again, she thought, feeling pushed to the limit. She propped the envelope against the elephant’s raised trunk but it fell face down, refusing to stay in position.

  Janet was about to prop it up again when she felt another dizzy spell. She reached for the wall, dislodging one of the black and white photos above the table. She didn’t notice it had shifted off its right angle.

  She took her hand off the wall in the effort to regain her equilibrium, at least just long enough to try to rest the envelope against the elephant again.

  She was determined to make it work this time. She was determined to make it work.

  TORONTO’S DOMINIONS

  LATA ARJUN MALHOTRA, née Lata Menon, cursed her Acura RDX for getting stuck in neutral when she pulled up to her Greater Toronto Area townhome. “Neutral? Seriously!” she whined, thinking of the argument she had with her husband that morning, one that she was determined to resume the moment she set foot in the door.

  Accustomed to weighing success and failure in the language of finance—a trait compounded by her position as the Investment Relations Manager at a Mississauga branch of Toronto Dominion Bank—she lamented the bear market into which her life had plunged since the Menon-Malhotra merger. So much for sound record management, she thought bitterly. An otherwi
se prudent R.K. Menon had unwittingly plunged his daughter, hennaed hands and feet first, into a marriage that ruined her market value with every day that she bore the dubious title, Mrs. Arjun Malhotra. Somewhere between the crossing of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, R.K. Menon’s investment into one hundred percent Brahmin stock, imported from the finest ports of his native Hind and selected among the old-moneyed echelon (a rare commodity amid Delhi’s steadily growing bourgeoisie), had crashed to Titanic depths.

  Sure, Arjun’s parents had tried to sweeten the deal like condensed milk drizzled on a saltine cracker. They had generously offered to waive her dowry, a custom that her uptight cousin in Vancouver referred to as the reason why millions of female fetuses ended up in Indian landfills, but which Lata thought of as an unimpeachable tradition designed precisely to protect a woman’s worth. Her father refused the offer, but begrudgingly made a show of accepting the Malhotras’ contribution to other matrimonial expenses. Still, by Lata’s calculations, a Toronto wedding paid for in dollars (while Canadian and American currency were on par, to boot!) versus a Delhi reception paid for in rupees hardly made for a fair rate of exchange. At least her gifts, which included a mini Fort Knox of gold coins (the new alternative to the conventional bangle set), was some compensation for the gross depreciation of what her father fondly referred to as his “best loved investment portfolio.”