She considered the photograph again. There was no accompanying letter. Still no indication of how long they would stay there. Or of where they planned to go when Sunita finished writing her book. And now they were married, but neither one had met the other’s family. At least this kept open the possibility of a return.
A relentless Soca beat pounded across the resort. The music usually signalled the beginning of the day’s activities: pool-side tanning; aerobics and salsa lessons; parasailing, deep sea diving and ski-dooing; facials and massages; and the ubiquitous drinking games, morning, noon, and night.
Lucita reached down for the detergents in the bottom tray of her cart. Straightening her bended knees, she walked slowly to the next room on her list, stationing her cart outside it. Here, she knocked twice, as protocol demanded, and then swiped her master key card through the electronic strip of Room 32A. The name on the chart read Célia and Pedro Ruiz-Caldéron, and Lucita was reminded of her brother’s recently acquired “time shares” in one of the soon-to-be-built Honduras resorts, and his invitation for them to visit him there.
The only thing that seemed more absurd than the idea of her brother vacationing at such a resort, was the idea of herself as a guest at one of these hotels. What would she want in exchange for a rainy day? she wondered in amusement.
Remembering a childhood saying about the sun being the roof of the poor, she sang quietly: Sol, solo te quedaste, de cobija de los pobres.
As was her habit, the first thing she did upon entering Room 32A was open the windows, releasing the cold air trapped inside.
BREAD AND ROTI
THE MECHANICAL RING of the toaster jolted Umara awake. She touched the side of her face, reminded of the pain. She turned her head and noticed a sparrow that beckoned from the balcony ledge of their ninth floor apartment.
Kashif, her son, came into the room carrying a plate with two slices of peanut-buttered toast. She couldn’t understand how he ate that dreadful paste. It looked like mud and stuck to the roof of your mouth.
“Ammi, remember your doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” he said, sitting down on the recliner he had made a point of claiming in his father’s absence.
She nodded slightly, the bare minimum of a gesture. It still hurt too much to talk, especially in the mornings before the day’s round of medications kicked in.
“It’s an important one,” he added, just as his cell phone rang.
Umara didn’t need reminding that today the doctor would tell them if she could finally be rid of the feeding tube inserted in her stomach. It made her feel like those factory machines.
“The news? No, I just woke up,” Umara heard Kashif say to someone.
She turned to the television. A film had started playing on her favourite Hindi Classics movie channel. An impious looking man in a frumpy suit was heckling workers hunched over by the weight of large sacks of flour they were carrying up a winding hill.
“Again? I can’t believe it!” Kashif’s voice drifted over to her in heated tones. “Is anyone hurt? And the maulana? Was he there when it happened? Khudah ke fazal.…”
Umara was taken aback by her son saying things like khudah ke fazal. He had never spoken that way. And why was he inquiring after a maulana? They hadn’t been to masjid in years.
“Of course, I will,” Kashif continued, somewhat flustered. “Please tell Ishaq-bhai I’ll be there.”
Ishaq-bhai? The name was vaguely familiar, but Umara wasn’t sure if Kashif had mentioned it before or if she knew it from somewhere else. She was increasingly bothered by the fact that her son was spending less and less time at home, and more and more time going god knows where and doing god knows what. It was too much like the months before.…
She felt the heat rise to her face. She was tired of the way the world kept sneaking up on her like a car’s headlights in a dense fog. With every part of her anatomy hijacked by the cancer treatments, could anyone blame her for feeling this way? Didn’t Kashif understand how little energy his mother had to be worrying about him too? She couldn’t inquire about his every movement and action. Simply watching his comings and goings was enough to wear her out.
Umara sank back into the film. The South Asian channels helped her through days that unfolded with the certainty of sickness and inertia. Yet the monotony was enough to make her miss her job at the Ginetti Family Food Corporation. She even felt a brief twinge of nostalgia for Indira-sahiba, her disagreeable supervisor. At least Indira-sahiba and her coworkers at the bakery were part of something that was uniquely hers. After all, she had worked there for the last … she struggled to do the math. Was it ten years? Twelve? Twenty?
“Too-too many years!” her Bangladeshi neighbour Nasreen-bibi used to say. “Umara, why don’t you get a job closer to home. Itni dur-dur hai—so far on that bus!”
Easy for Nasreen-bibi to say, Umara thought irritably. Her uppity neighbour hadn’t worked a day in her life. What did she know about what it took for someone like her to get a job? Umara would have been willing to accept anything—even working under the table, as Indira-sahiba had referred to it in her overly contrived Canadian accent. Had it not been for Nasreen-bibi’s husband, Zia-bhai, who liked to dole out unsolicited advice lest people forget he was a bigshot lawyer in Dakka, she would have blindly accepted such terms.
And what a thrill it was to receive her first paycheque, issued in the name of Umara Haroon Siddiqui. It was so official … so Canadian, she had thought at the time. Even though she felt cheated by all those deductions, thinking that maybe Zia-bhai had misled her, the bi-weekly cheques made her feel like her own person. That’s why the first thing that upset her about the cancer diagnosis was the prospect of losing her job, and becoming the government’s charity case.
“It isn’t charity, Umara-bhain,” Zia-bhai corrected her. “It’s your money. The hospital bills, the time off work … you’ve been paying into those benefits all these years. Why do you think I told you to insist on doing things the right way?”
She couldn’t get over how much she was itching to get back to work. But when? The doctor had said it would be quite a while before she was “out of the woods.” The expression had stuck: when she looked at her reflection in the mirror she thought of a mountain after monsoon season: treeless, muddy, and beaten down by a landslide. At least that’s what she saw now that a section of her tongue and cheek—or oral cavity, as they called it—was cut out to prevent the cancer from spreading.
“Can’t let … injustice … something … about it,” Kashif’s voice weaved in and out of the voices in the film: “Bhookh laghe hai! Bhookh laghe hai!” the frumpy man taunted the workers struggling not to buckle under the weight of those bags, their only path to a meal at the day’s end.
“Mein bookha hun,” Umara parroted the man in the film, thinking of the few words Kashif’s father would say in the months before he left.
***
She stood in their small galley kitchen, kneading a fresh mound of dough. Once it had formed to the desired elasticity, she tore off a piece and rolled it into a ball on the lightly-floured portion of the kitchen counter. Then slap, slap, slap, she started to flatten it down with her hands, making it thinner and thinner as it hit each palm, back and forth, back and forth. She knew better than to make the chapatis too early. He couldn’t stand it when she heated them up in the microwave. And he was right. The microwave made them stiff as a board, like those Ginetti biscuits. As soon as she got home from work, she would prepare the dough and leave it to sit in a bowl under a dishcloth, while one vegetable and one meat dish simmered to perfection on the stove. The last step of placing the flattened circles of dough on the tawa was reserved for the moment she heard him come in. She watched the chapatis bubble up on the iron pan. Then she picked them up, one by one, scorching the tips of her fingers. Each one placed lovingly in her favourite bread basket with the colourful tassels, one of the few things she had b
rought with her from Lahore. To think that the basket was now as old as their marriage, as old as their only child, already a teenager finishing his last year of school, and as old as the life they had built, more apart than together it seemed, in this new land.
By the time he had washed his hands of a day spent chauffeuring people around the city in his taxi, and seated himself at the table, a batch of steaming hot chapatis filled the apartment with the nourishing aroma of home.
***
Umara longed for her customary breakfast of roti-makhan-chini, a warm piece of roti fresh off the tawa, with a dollop of ghee and a light sprinkling of sugar melting over it, but she hadn’t made or eaten any kind of roti in months.
A weight pressed down on the sofa cushion beside her. It was Kashif rummaging around for something. She shifted her right hip, the slightest movement igniting little stabbing sensations on the right side of her face. The remote poked through a cushion, so she fished it out and handed it to her son.
He resumed his position on the armchair. “I have to change the channel, ammi. I can record your movie.”
“Channel change karó,” she managed to say.
Kashif was addicted to the news, Umara reflected, as the familiar chatter of the morning shows came on. She didn’t mind watching the Canadian news now that so many broadcasters were South Asians. If she plugged her ears and only watched, she could almost be back home. If she closed her eyes and only listened, there would be no telling the difference between them and the goras.
This is the second act of vandalism against the mosque. This time a burned Quran was thrown inside along with a letter, the contents of which have as yet to be released.… The police have only confirmed that the incident is being investigated.… In other news, stores are running out of Hunger Games costumes for Halloween faster than they can stock the shelves.…
A shaft of morning light illuminated Kashif’s jawline as he leaned in to watch the news. If it weren’t for the stubble on his unshaven face, he was a spitting image of his father. Haroon Siddiqui was a good-looking man. Everyone had said so at their wedding. The uncanny resemblance between father and son reignited the kind of silent glares and conspiratorial whispers from family and friends that had made her acutely aware of the obvious mismatch between husband and wife.
Kashif put his plate on the coffee table with a heavy hand and changed the channel back to the Hindi movie. Mehboob Khan, the name of the director, appeared on the bottom of the screen, as the scene shifted over to a palatial, marble-floored room where a stern-looking woman in a finely embroidered sari was scolding a household of domestic servants.
Umara didn’t really like such old movies, but this one reminded her of the Pakistani films that were much harder to come by, maybe because they had more drama and dialogue than the flashy song-and-dance of Bollywood. The audio was a little shaky and the film was grainy in parts, showing its wear-and-tear in ways she could relate to. As if someone had pressed a fast-forward button the moment they stepped onto that plane, twenty-two years ago. As if their whole lives had just unfolded at some accelerated rate, with only the news of an uncle’s death or a cousin’s wedding giving her pause, giving her any sense of what made one year any different from another. The cancer was just another kind of accelerant. She wasn’t afraid of it like some of the other patients seemed to be. If anything, the doctors were surprised by how stoically she was handling it all.
***
“Are you a smoker, Mrs. Siddiqui?” Doctor Eleniak asked.
It felt like an inquisition. She had never smoked a day in her life. She always rushed past the women smoking outside the bakery during breaks. She hated the way the odour clung to her clothes for the rest of the day, implicating her in their vice.
“Alcohol?”
Kashif, who not only brought her to the hospital but also agreed to accompany her to these appointments, answered for her: “We’re Muslim. It’s haram.”
Umara was proud to hear him say “we.” She didn’t think he was a believer, tacitly having accepted Nasreen-bibi’s reproach that the younger generation were losing their faith.
“Second-hand smoke?” the doctor persisted, looking at his notes. “Do other members of your household smoke?”
Umara pushed a stray hair behind her ear self-consciously, realizing whom the doctor was referring to. What was she supposed to say? That Haroon had neither smoked nor drank a day in his life, but had brought gunha to their lives all the same? She exhaled with relief when Kashif took the initiative: “It’s just the two of us.”
“I see,” Doctor Eleniak replied nonchalantly.
A litany of questions followed about her diet, all of which the doctor directed to Kashif. “Does she eat very salty foods? Preserved foods?”
“She makes all of our meals from scratch.”
“I see.… And it says here that your mother works.”
This time Umara answered promptly. Her English was broken, that much was true. She had never had the time to take those ESL classes way back when. How could she? She was pregnant with Kashif almost as soon as they arrived and then thrown into that job as soon as Kashif was old enough to start school. Besides, there was hardly any need to speak English at the bakery. Everyone spoke some level of Urdu or Hindi, even the Punjabi women who dominated the assembly lines. And although her husband used to take care of what she called the outside business, like paying bills or dealing with the landlord, she had picked up enough English by osmosis, through her son or television or those flyers that poured into the building once a week.
“I work at bakery. Since Kashif is five.”
“It’s not exactly a bakery,” Kashif qualified. “She calls it that. It’s a factory that manufactures Italian cookies … the ones that break your teeth.”
“Biscotti?” Doctor Eleniak strained to crack a smile.
“Right. And other baked products like those funny S-shaped biscuits. It’s Mom’s job to do the sorting before things are packaged. Why do you ask about her job?”
The doctor mumbled something about the possible link between cancer and environmental hazards at the workplace, before turning back to Umara: “Mrs. Siddiqui, mouth cancer, in and of itself, is not that unusual. What is unusual is the rapidity with which it has spread through the right side of your mouth. There is a possibility that it may also have spread into your lymph nodes. The only treatment at this stage is to remove a section of your tongue and those affected nodes, as the case may be, after which we will have to give you an aggressive post-surgery treatment. Is this clear?”
Both mother and son nodded, stunned into silence by the prospect of such a surgery, the medieval image so out of sync with the polished surfaces, smiling support staff, and state-of-the-art equipment at the Princess Margaret hospital.
Doctor Eleniak glossed over their startled expressions: “Do you have any questions?”
Kashif was about to say something when they were interrupted by a hard tap at the window behind the doctor’s desk.
“Bichari,” Umara exclaimed.
“Excuse me?” Doctor Eleniak turned to Kashif again.
Kashif had also noticed the little bird fly straight into the window, but ignored it. “What about food?” he asked. “Eating?”
Doctor Eleniak cleared his throat and closed his file. “Unfortunately, it is likely that your mother will not be able to chew or swallow for a good long time after treatment. We will have to insert a feeding tube into her stomach to ensure she receives adequate nutrition. And I must caution that in some cases patients do not recover their ability to eat whole foods, and their taste buds are almost certainly compromised.”
Kashif winced and looked at his mother: “Ammi, sab kuch samji?”
Umara was still focused on the window, only vaguely aware of the doctor’s ensuing description of the months of treatment ahead. “Wo parinda kahan gaya hai?” she said to no one in
particular, wondering where the bird had gone.
***
Umara touched the side of her face, still unaccustomed to the sensation of flaccid skin. The medical team at the Princess Margaret were always so concerned about these physical changes, constantly reminding her of the counselling and rehabilitation available for patients undergoing invasive surgeries. But the truth of it was that she would not know what to do or say at such sessions. For one, all that talk about body and image made her uncomfortable. They would never understand that she didn’t think much about such things. Why would she, when she had spent her best years covered up in a long factory coat, rubber gloves, and hair netting? When Kashif was younger, they had made a point of attending Eid festivities, which were always fun to dress up for, but Kashif’s father’s erratic shifts soon made attendance at the masjid or social functions increasingly difficult.
It was just as well, she rationalized, because she could not imagine having to face the community now. It would be like the wedding all over again. Only this time the judgment behind those silent glares would be that much greater. Still, she would be lying if she said she didn’t miss the festivities, the sound of children shrieking with delight at the sight of balloons and colourful stacks of mithai, and the adults hovering equally excitedly over generous dishes of mutton biryani, haleem, and at least three types of roti.
Umara heard her son turn on the shower, and wondered where he could be going so early on his day off. It obviously had something to do with this Ishaq-bhai, another unknown that gave her pause. She wasn’t about to lose husband and son to some other life. As much as she hated the idea, she considered asking Nasreen-bibi or Zia-bhai to help keep an eye on him, at least till she was back on her feet.
But any contact with Nasreen-bibi came at a price. First, it meant having to hear her neighbour’s ministrations about this-that-or-the other. And second, it meant overlooking the fact that Nasreen-bibi had turned frosty since the truth about Kashif’s father could no longer be contained. While this had not stopped Nasreen-bibi from offering assistance during the worst of the chemo and radiation treatments, her neighbour had made a point of sending one of her daughters to drop off food or groceries rather than make an appearance herself. Umara understood that Nasreen-bibi had her standing in the community to uphold, having always flaunted the fact that her brother was a haji, and some cousin-third-removed in England a celebrated Imam. Umara envied Nasreen-bibi’s piety, attributing it as the source of her many blessings, including three beautiful children: a son and two daughters.
Outside People and Other Stories Page 9