Outside People and Other Stories

by Mariam Pirbhai

  October 21, 2010

  Bondye bon. In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps. Today I keep my letter short, dear Frances, because my steps have been determined, and I walk with joy and purpose once again. I must confess that in the months following the earthquake I wrote many letters to you but I could not get myself to send them. How could I burden you with my regrets and petty disappointments at such a time? Nor did I think they would reach you even if I had. But now you must hear what I have to say. In fact, if I could, I would go to the Cross that sits atop the pretty mountain-park at the centre of this city, and I would shout out my news for all to hear. (You should know that the Cross was erected centuries ago by the city’s founder when the city was destroyed by a disastrous flood. I only know this because I once walked to the top of the mountain to see the Cross for myself. It was my private little pilgrimage to give thanks for my arrival.) So imagine that I am saying this from the city’s highest summit, the one that is closest to Our Father, when you read this: I am coming home!

  Home! The word struck her like a final blow, loosening her grip on the letter. Frances looked around the room, thinking that someone had entered. There was no one there. She held down the letter on the table and traced the words on the page, all the force of her energy directed toward them: I am coming home. The phrase assaulted her like the carnage of a fallen city, making it hard to think, hard to move, hard to breathe. It was too much. Too much. In the next second the heaviness was replaced with guilt. Guilt for not feeling the joy these words so clearly conveyed for her sister. She clicked the mouse and reactivated the screen, compelled to watch the video again, but this time from beginning to end—all thirty-five seconds. She watched the woman walking in the lonely hours of the early morning, well before others had risen. Only unlike them she had already finished a long day’s work. All she wanted was to go home and rest her feet, to catch a few hours of sleep, to gather strength so she could start all over again, the next day. The next day. She should have had a next day, Frances raged inwardly. And then the man—no, the boy, as the police had corrected her—reappeared again, walking only steps behind her. He must have been waiting in the shadows. He put his hand in his jacket. It must have been to pull out the knife—a kitchen knife, the police had told her. He is just a boy, she heard the words again. Was that his mother’s knife? The one she used to prepare his dinners? She remembered wanting to ask the police this question, but the details assaulted her in spliced images and sounds, and she could not be sure if any of it was real. But his shadow was real, wasn’t it? He was real when he followed her, hastening his steps till he was out of the frame. It was impossible to imagine it and yet here it was, for all to see, on a street video surveillance camera. But what about the things that were not seen? The things beyond the camera’s frame? Like the nine stab wounds to her arms, her back, her chest, and her left leg? Like the fact that she was dead before the paramedics arrived because of one fatal wound. Which one, she asked, preparing herself for information whose delivery by a middle-aged policeman—his hat tilted on a crop of blond hair, his eyes expressionless and cool, his burly stature incongruous against a light so soft it gave him an absurdly ethereal quality, like a halo—she knew would stay with her forever. Which one, she asked again, refusing to be spared a single detail. The one to the upper left part of the abdomen—to the spleen, he qualified. She was a nurse, she recalled saying softly, more to herself than to the policeman. She would have known in that instant. She would have known where he had stabbed her. She would have known what that meant. She would have known that it would be a matter of hours before she bled out. That there would be no hope of survival. She would have known. She would have known. She would have known. Frances put her head in her hands and sobbed inconsolably for the first time since her arrival. She cried and cried and cried, unaware that the kind policewoman had come into the room and was touching her arm, telling her it was time to go. Time to face whatever else needed to be faced. She lifted her head up and saw the letter still open on the table, the words blurry through her cloud of tears. She had to finish reading it, she told herself. She owed her sister that much. She owed her sister that and so much more. She picked up the letter and looked at the policewoman who seemed to understand what she needed, leaving the room as unobtrusively as she had entered, leaving Frances alone with her sister’s letters.

  I am coming home because, finally, I have completed my status as a permanent resident. Do you know what this means, Frances? This means that I can come and go as I please! I can travel like any Canadian citizen. Free to leave, free to return, as I please. But return to what? I have given this so much thought in the past few months. I have wondered if I will ever have a claim on this land. And no matter what I do, will it ever really wish to claim me? It won’t be long before I take the citizen’s oath, but what about the oath I took as a nurse? And, most importantly, what about my oath to you, that your sacrifices would not be in vain? It is to you I owe the biggest debt, Frances. If it weren’t for you and all those years you worked so hard to pay for my training.… How much you suffered in that dreadful place, cutting and sewing, cutting and sewing, all day long. And how we would joke and say that I, too, was learning to cut and to sew just so I could patch you up every time you came home, your hands bleeding from the pokes and pricks of those industrial machines. What a terrible joke to make, Frances! But we laughed all the same. What was there to do but laugh? But in all seriousness, now, I read somewhere that even those factories have shut down, and I wonder how you are surviving? You haven’t been entirely honest with me either, have you? All of your assurances that you are managing just fine, that I have nothing to be concerned about—these you say to protect me. And all I can do is hope that the few money transfers I have made in the last months have reached you, but with the state of our banks I cannot even be certain of this. And now there are even fewer and fewer updates about what is going on since the world’s attention has been diverted by other events as spectacular as our own. The foreign aid has dried up and the emergency teams have packed up and gone but what lies ahead for us? Years of rebuilding, years of finding our way again, our city broken, like our hearts. What lies ahead but healing? So, you see, there is nothing else for me to do here, a place where all I can do is pray. At least in these past few months I have been forced to remain idle, in this state of limbo, I have found comfort in the saying: You can do more than pray after you’ve prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed. It is time now to do more than pray. It is time to come home. Bondye nou an Fidel. Agatha.

  Frances wanted desperately to answer Agatha’s questions, to allay her fears, to tell her that she had received the money she had sent—money without which she would not have been able to make this long journey for the woman in the path of a random event who fought, till the very last second, to live—just enough, that is, to take her sister home.

  CROSSING OVER

  “KRISHNA, YOU’RE driving too fast! The roads are a skating rink as it is!” Radha squealed, checking for the hundredth time if her seatbelt was securely fastened.

  “I know how icy it is out there!” Krishna sputtered, speeding up an extra five kilometres.

  “If we had only looked at the weather channel before leaving, I would have cancelled our dinner with the Akbars.”

  “Not that I would have minded skipping this dinner, but you don’t think I was aware it was snowing? Didn’t you see me out there with the snow-blower before leaving? Who do you think cleared the driveway?” Krishna rejoindered, his blood pressure rising with the speedometer. He could feel the car begin to skid so he gently pumped his brakes, just as he had been shown at Driver’s Ed all those years back. New immigrants had to learn to drive again, apparently. And he was grateful for it too, because navigating one’s way past bullock carts, rickshaws, potholes, and an onslaught of pedestrians on a Mumbai boulevard now seemed like a walk-in-the-park. In a coastal Atlantic city like
Halifax, an average drive on a winter’s day involved bypassing a twenty-ton snow plough, braking for deer to avoid charges of fauna-manslaughter, while hitting a patch of black ice just as one’s wiper blades gave out and left you blind in the middle of a blizzard on a dim-lit winding road. He had learned early on that acute dexterity, bionic peripheral vision, and nerves of steel were the basics of road preparedness here.

  A quarter of a century in this country and we’ve never so much as swerved off the road, but she still doesn’t trust my winter driving, he thought irritably. Besides, Radha drove at a steady forty-eight kilometres per hour, sun or snow, rain or shine, so he wasn’t about to take driving tips from her. And now that he fancied himself a road-hardy Canadian driver in what he liked to call “our true north,” an anthemic phrase that had stuck in his brain like a Vedic mantra since their citizenship ceremony, he was hard pressed to fuss over a few patches of ice and a humdrum snowstorm. This province alone spends five million in tax payers’ dollars just to salt the roads each winter; they have handsomely paid civil servants working around the clock to keep our streets safe while people like Radha get their beauty sleep; they have a system here—structure, order.

  It’s a small price to pay for civilization, Krishna reasoned as he over-shot the Akbars’ driveway and parked at the edge of the front lawn, which was buried under several feet of snow.

  “Houston: the Eagle has landed!” he proclaimed theatrically, pushing the ignition button and bailing himself out of the car as purposefully as Buzz Aldrin. As he trudged up what he assessed to be nothing less than a treacherous moon-walk on Tariq Akbar’s poorly shovelled driveway, he realized that his wife was nowhere in sight. Blast it, where the devil is that woman now? A final lipstick touch-up? It’s only the Akbars!

  Radha was still holed up in the car. Seeing her wrapping her knuckles on the window, Krishna let out an affectionate chortle, mumbled something under his breath, and used the indents created by his heavy winter boots in the freshly fallen snow to retrace his steps back down the driveway.

  Radha sat with her arms crossed as she watched her husband rummage through just about every pocket of his winter coat for something or other. Then he pulled off one glove and set off on a second pocket-rummaging expedition till he fished out a small cylinder.

  “Always prepared!” he barked triumphantly, holding up a lock de-icer for Radha’s admiration.

  Radha was neither amused nor impressed as she watched her husband fumble with the de-icer in the slow, mechanical gestures she had come to identify as uniquely his.

  “It isn’t working!” Krishna yelled, as he tried to pry his hand off the ice-encrusted passenger door handle.

  “What?” Radha yelled back.

  “The door’s still frozen shut! … Look, you will have to cross over the gear stick and get out from the driver’s side!”

  “The driver? You’re the driver!”

  “No! The driver’s side!” Krishna said again. Then, miming the shape of a bridge and speaking slowly: “Cross over to the driver’s side!”

  “Cross over?”

  “Yes!”

  “No!”

  “Why ever not?” Krishna’s patience was waning, his eyelashes weighed down with snowflakes.

  “I cannot!” Radha repeated, drawing out the “not” for added emphasis. She had spent an uncharacteristic amount of time pleating her sari tonight. For some reason it was not cooperating. Maybe it was sticking because of the static from the woollen stockings she had worn. Or maybe it was because they hadn’t seen Mumtaz and Tariq in a while and the invitation was making her anxious. Or maybe it was just one of those days. And now she was stuck in the car without a winter coat! All she had for warmth was a grey cashmere shawl, stockings, and leather gloves. Nor had she worn her thermal boots since she had fully expected having to walk no more than a few steps, from the car to the Akbars’ doorstep, supported by the extended arm of a gentleman.

  “What do you mean you ‘cannot’?” her husband hollered.

  “I’m wearing a sari! You know I can’t cross over like this! Just open my door!”

  Krishna squirted a generous amount of de-icer into the passenger door lock again, but to no avail. He was beginning to feel the cold creep into his extremities.

  “Will you please cross over, sari or no sari! I can’t open the door!”

  “I’m telling you I cannot!”

  “Then, what do you want me to do? Break the door down?”

  “Break it if you have to!” Radha retorted imperiously. “But I will not cross over!”

  Realizing his wife would have sat in the car all night if only for her unfaltering sense of propriety—a quality whose utility he now questioned—Krishna knew he didn’t stand a chance. She would rather freeze to death than hike up her sari, of this there was no doubt in his mind. “That’s it, then! I’m going in! Let me know when you decide to show a little common sense.”

  “Krishna!” Radha yelped like a puppy left behind in its owner’s car at a grocery store parking lot.

  Of course, Krishna had no intention of leaving his wife in the car. Of course, he was going to ask Tariq for help. But to say he wasn’t bothered by the fact that, after all these years and all these winters, she still refused to wear more sensible clothing would be a lie. Tradition had its time and place and a snow-covered land in sub-zero temperatures in the middle of the night was neither the time nor the place. Why couldn’t she be more like Tariq’s wife, Mumtaz, who adopted western attire with little fuss, and who happened to look quite fetching in those pantsuits of hers, he reflected rather sheepishly.

  “As-Salam Alaikum, Krishna!” Tariq Akbar exclaimed as he opened a pine-scented, Christmas-wreathed front door.

  “Namaste,” Krishna replied distractedly.

  Tariq was instantly unnerved. Would it kill him to say “W’Alaikum Salam”? It was his house, after all. He was owed a modicum of respect! Tariq thought indignantly, fully preparing himself for an unpleasant evening. Why had he conceded to playing the gracious host tonight? Mumtaz had pushed for the dinner, even though she knew how much Krishna and his wife—in fact, even more so his wife—got under his skin. He perked up when he noticed she wasn’t there. “Where’s Radha? Not feeling well?”

  “She’s here! She’s just stuck in the car! Her door’s locked and she refuses to cross over to the driver’s seat because she’s afraid of getting her precious sari unravelled. Her husband’s brains she doesn’t worry about unravelling, but her sari … God forbid! I don’t know what else she wants me to do. Smash the lock with a tire-iron or something? It’s a Mercedez! That’s a ten-thousand dollar door!”

  Tariq winced over Krishna’s irksome habit of reminding him how much money he made. First, their waterfront property on the Bedford Harbour, then their daughter’s exorbitant wedding, and now this latest indulgence. Who did he think he was kidding, driving around in a hundred-thousand dollar car? They both came from a time and a place where only sheikhs and princes drove cars like that.

  “I’m sure we’ll find another way,” he said, trying his utmost to maintain his cool while hurriedly ushering Krishna inside the house so as not to waste the heating. He had become acutely conscious of the hefty price of running a household in a cold climate. Even keeping the fireplace going barely cut down on costs. He couldn’t get over how exorbitant the price of firewood was—almost the equivalent of a monthly gas bill. He continually griped about the fact that they were surrounded by forest as far as the eye could see, and yet they paid through their noses for wood. This would lead him to the related pet peeve that no one had figured out how to harness all this natural energy, an observation that was generally punctuated with the taunt: And they call this the developed world!

  Radha watched the Akbars’ front door close as she sat helpless in the car. Both her husband and Tariq had abandoned her. So typical, she bemoaned. First these men talk us in
to coming to this arctic outpost, and then they leave it up to us to figure out how to survive!