Outside People and Other Stories

by Mariam Pirbhai

  Snow brought in by a gust of north-westerly winds started to blanket the driver’s side of the car, making Radha feel boxed in, much as she had felt in those early years as a new immigrant. How odd that she had never felt like this in Mumbai, she mused, not even while she was taking time off work to raise their newborn son. If their home was not always bustling with friends and family, there were so many occasions and events to get her out of the house. But even though she loved that precious time with her son, she had been eager to get back to work. There was a shortage of teachers at the time and the school board had set a new rising pay scale commensurate with one’s level of education. This would mean a considerable increase in salary for someone like her—someone with a graduate degree. If only she had known then what she knew now, she may have worked harder to convince Krishna not to emigrate.

  But Krishna had been so determined, and all of his arguments appeared perfectly sound at the time: they had a points system there, he said; they had a better chance than anyone of being successful applicants because of their skills and their education; and all the benefits of working in the West would pay off in spades for their children. When he felt her yielding to the idea, he dared to add: and what about the adventure of it all? Of course, they wouldn’t be pioneers because others had made the journey long before them. But putting down roots in a country that had only recently opened its doors to people like them, looking to build its national character in new and exciting ways, would be a welcome relief from a place mired in thousands of years of squabbles and rivalries. He even boasted about how they were all former British imperial subjects and thus part of the same historical lineage. She had wanted to remind him of that nasty Komagata Maru affair, but held back. Theirs was a young marriage and she had to admit that she got caught up in the romance of it all: a husband and wife and their first-born child leaving everything and everyone behind to make a new life for themselves in such an exotic and distant land.

  Acquaintances and neighbours would often ask them why they immigrated to Canada, fully expecting a heart-wrenching sob story. They must have been escaping something terrible? Poverty, war, oppression? True, they would never be wealthy back home but, in every way that counted, their life in the world they left behind was a good one. It was hard to explain this thirst that her husband had for adventure, which she could only attribute to his own sense of the sublime. Radha was likely partly to blame for all that poetry she used to read to him in the early days of their marriage. How enamoured he was by her ability to recite, verbatim, some of her favourite works by Shelley, Bryon, and Blake. He would get so caught up in their otherworldly visions. Was it any wonder he fancied himself something of a modern-day Magellan?

  Radha noticed her window frosting over in fractal-like patterns. If Krishna didn’t get back soon, she would be entombed in a crypt of unforgiving whiteness. She took a deep breath in and exhaled through her mouth, a breathing exercise her yogi insisted she perform whenever she felt anxious, which was more often than not. She looked through the empty spaces between the frosted glass and remarked how quiet the street was. Sitting in the car on a dark street reminded her of one her favourite poems, but she had to scour her brain to remember the words. It had been so long since she had been in front of the classroom that her repertoire of poems had long since slipped out of her memory. There was something about a rock, she thought. A rock and a chain. It killed her not to remember. She tried again, this time trying to excise the useless information—the banalities of her daily “to do” list—that generally cluttered her mind these days. How could she have forgotten? So what if she wasn’t a teacher anymore? It wasn’t so very long ago when all this knowledge was as essential to her as breathing.

  She peered out of the window again and realized that someone was waving to her from inside the house. She squinted and strained to see beyond the snowfall. It was Mumtaz. She waved back half-heartedly, certain that Mumtaz wouldn’t be able to see her, but reassured that at least they all hadn’t forgotten about her.

  Even through the veil of frost, ice, and blowing snow, Mumtaz cut such an elegant figure, Radha thought. Not only was she a beautiful woman, but she managed to carry herself with a grace and confidence that Radha could never emulate. But more than any of these attributes, Mumtaz fit in here in a way that she didn’t or couldn’t. For one, she spoke English like a British aristocrat, no doubt from all the years she and Tariq had spent abroad, hobnobbing in cosmopolitan circles. Radha felt that Mumtaz laid on the accent a bit thick, but her elongated “a’s” and her staccato “t’s” seemed worth the price of any number of professional credentials. The fact of the matter was that Mumtaz was out there, working and earning a living, while she was cooped up at home with little to do but volunteer at the South Asian women’s association or plan the occasional dinner party. It was ironic really: Mumtaz was the uneducated one but managed to come across as worldly and employable; Radha was the educated one and managed to come across as “not meeting the standards.”

  This made Radha’s discovery of what she privately referred to as Mumtaz’s “second migration”—not from country-to-country but from home-to-world—as unsettling as it was unsurprising. She was nonetheless speechless the day she found Mumtaz working at the Tea Store.

  ***

  “Radha! How marvelous to see you! What brings you out on such a tempestuous day!”

  “Oh, I was going a little stir crazy at home! You too, I see,” Radha said presumptuously.

  “Right. Well, I…”

  Just then they were interrupted by a younger woman who called out: “Taz, we need someone on cash.”

  Mumtaz woodenly walked over to the cash register to ring in a customer’s purchase. Radha was left staring blankly at a shelf of teapots, dumbfounded by this highly unexpected turn of events. Since when did Mumtaz work? The Akbars, unlike them, had come here on an entrepreneurial visa. They lived quite lavishly. They were people who had wined and dined ambassadors and celebrities. In their house, one sat on bone-inlaid furniture, dined with soft lighting emanating from hanging fanooses, gazed into Venetian mirrors, and walked on Oriental rugs which, as Mumtaz once informed her, were heirlooms from Isphahan and Balochistan, while the men extinguished their cigarettes in ashtrays chiselled out of Himalayan slopes or finely etched brass. And it was all the real deal: purchased on site and carted across continents in well-insured shipping containers; everything in that house was authentic and authenticated, rather than the kind of Chinese imitations Radha liked to buy at the big-box stores. She and Krishna always felt a bit out of sorts at the Akbar home, even now, considering theirs was a much more humble beginning. They had used up all their savings in the application process to Canada, coming to the country with a screaming baby and a few suitcases filled with nothing but the value of their respective degrees in education and accounting.

  If truth be told, Radha had reflected on more than one occasion, their friendship with the Akbars was born out of chance and necessity. If Krishna had not dealt with Tariq the day he came to the bank to apply for a mortgage, they would never have met. Had she and Krishna had their own circle of friends back then, they would likely never have asked the Akbars, who were new arrivals at the time, for dinner. The community was so small in those early days. It was a relief to meet the Akbars, whose pre-partition roots in India were reason enough to lay the groundwork for a friendship in a sleepy Maritime town, thousands of miles from the Subcontinent.

  Still, this did not take away from the fact that theirs was a friendship that was continually tested by their obvious differences, including their husbands’ common impulse to always be right. If history, politics, and religion weren’t the basis of Tariq’s and Krishna’s perpetual sparring, then their vastly different trajectories to the West filled the space between them with epic tension, Krishna looking on their migration with unqualified pride and Tariq looking on his with unqualified resentment.

  Perhaps the increasing gu
lf between them was an unfortunate but natural evolution of their friendship, Radha surmised. Come to think of it, the gulf had only widened since that day at the Tea Store.

  Mumtaz walked back to Radha who nervously fidgeted with a glass tea pot, oddly shaped like a pagoda. “Can I help you find something special today?” she asked officiously.

  “Special?”

  “Yes, in fact we have a stupendous special this week: buy one of our newest tea blends and get a second one for fifty percent off!”

  “Oh no … I was just … browsing.”

  Mumtaz seemed distracted, another customer demanding her attention at the cash register, so she excused herself again before Radha had a chance to escape. This time she was close enough to hear Mumtaz chatting to the other sales clerk while ringing in the customer’s purchase.

  “Oh, darling, you really mustn’t settle! You’re far too dear a catch to accept some tawdry affair!” The two of them twittered and chuckled like they were bosom buddies, the vast differences in age and background seeming far too little a thing to stand between Mumtaz and this new world she seemed to inhabit like a second skin. It was enough to bring Radha to the brink of an anxiety attack, but she managed to walk over to the cash register, mumble a flustered goodbye, and leave without further ado.

  Neither had spoken to each other for months before Mumtaz encountered Radha at the mall again. This time she was on a lunch break, and asked Radha if she would join her. Radha could see no way out of the invitation. She prepared herself for an awkward conversation, but Mumtaz seemed in genuine need of a sympathetic ear. They had fallen on such hard times that even their home was at risk of foreclosure, Mumtaz said, disburdening herself almost the moment they sat down in the food court. When Radha inquired into what she euphemistically referred to as Tariq’s “situation,” Mumtaz explained that her husband had proved to be unemployable. Apparently, she remarked with uncharacteristic cynicism, his money was good enough to secure them immigration papers, but the lifetime of business acumen he brought with him wasn’t worth so much as the price of the Customs declaration form. He had even gone so far as to apply for a taxi licence, but that didn’t pan out because of his ailing health. On this note, Mumtaz was surprisingly frank, admitting that her husband had sunk into a depression but refused to seek any kind of clinical treatment or professional help.

  This finally pushed Mumtaz to take action and find work, anywhere she could get it. She had always helped Tariq with whatever urgent matters his business demanded, but she had never been “out there” in the regular workforce, and she certainly had no expectation that she could succeed in getting a job—any kind of job—where her husband had failed. As luck would have it, she said, suddenly sitting tall in her seat, she was window shopping at the mall one day when she saw a Help Wanted sign for a sales clerk at the new Tea Store, so she just went for it.

  “You know how I can’t get through the day without at least six cups of tea!” she winked lightheartedly. “So I thought if anyone could sell tea, I could. Besides, we change so much of ourselves to fit in here but our chai—I’ll be damned if our chai is going to become Canadian too. Don’t they know how silly it is to say ‘chai tea,’ as if chai is an English word, when all they are really saying is “tea tea!”

  Radha smiled weakly. She, too, was irritated by chai being packaged and consumed as if it were some kind of North American invention, but she knew Mumtaz was just trying to put a positive spin on the situation—just trying to make lemonade out of lemons, or chai out of spoiled milk.

  “And now I get to set the record straight about tea being a South Asian drink that the British took from us, not the other way around!” Mumtaz continued, seemingly determined to turn her attention to lighter subjects now that her confession was over.

  As she prattled on about the different kinds of tea they sold at the store for ridiculous prices, Radha found herself preoccupied by her own “situation”—perhaps one of the few things she and Tariq had in common, she reflected in hindsight. In fact, she desperately wanted to make some confessions of her own, such as how mortified she was that day at the store, not because she was embarrassed for her friend, but because Mumtaz had attained, against all odds, what she was unable to attain with all of her training and education. But something kept her from sharing her personal struggle with her friend. Maybe it was because she was a little jealous of Mumtaz who, with no apparent skill set and no qualifications, had ventured out into this impenetrable job market without running into a hundred walls. Or maybe she was resentful of Mumtaz who had the advantage of her good looks and fair complexion. Someone for whom words like “darling,” “tawdry,” and “stupendous” rolled off her tongue like melted ghee; someone who wore pants and sweaters, not saris and bindis, and who just seemed to belong, no matter where she was or what she did.

  I, too, just went for it, didn’t I? Radha reflected bitterly. She had put herself out there many, many times, she wanted to tell Mumtaz, but this was a source of private humiliation that she was unable to share with anyone, even Krishna. How many jobs had she applied for with the same results: “Of course, we can see you have plenty of experience, Mrs. Chatterjee, but rules are rules,” countless Human Resources directors had told her at countless schools. Her self-esteem took a special kind of beating when she was matter-of-factly asked why she was applying to be an English teacher when English was not her native language. “There are certain standards we have to maintain,” the director had added, not so much as giving her a chance to respond that English was as much a first language to her as Hindi, and that he would do well to remember his own British imperial history. “You understand, of course.…”

  Yes, she understood. She understood perfectly. She understood that a woman in a sari, a long black plait and a red dot on her forehead was not qualified enough to relate to a room full of North American teenagers. She understood that an English teacher had to walk and talk a certain way to teach Shakespeare and Blake, and she neither talked the talk nor walked the walk. She understood that in this country her qualifications were no better than a weight around a drowning man’s neck.

  Still, her determination held sway over the humiliation she had suffered, at least for time enough to endure a few more meetings with school board officials, meetings for which she shed the bindi and sari and wore suits, albeit a little ill-fitting. She even took pronunciation classes at a community college, as she had been advised by some workshop counsellor at the Ministry, but she still couldn’t land an interview, not even as a substitute teacher. Instead, she was told to “upgrade” her skills, to consider an internship, to take job-search workshops, even to return to university to get an additional degree, despite the fact that she held degrees in English and Education.

  ***

  Radha looked up at the house again, but the car was almost completely blanketed in snow and the window pane was covered in frost. She managed to scrape a portion of the window clean from the inside and look out but all she could see was a haze of lights emanating from the house. Everything else was a sea of black speckled by fuzzy white dots, like an old television monitor with no signal.

  How quiet everything is here, she remarked again. How still. Such empty spaces. Such giant skies. Such a contrast to everything she had known. Her land, her weather, her sky. And then she remembered, the words sliding off her tongue as effortlessly as Mumtaz’s colourful vocabulary:

  A silent suffering and intense,

  The rock, the vulture, and the chain

  All that the proud can feel of pain,

  The agony they do not show,

  The suffocating sense of woe

  Which speaks but in its loneliness.

  And then is jealous lest the sky

  Should have a listener, nor will sigh

  Until its voice is echoless.

  “Until its voice is echoless,” she repeated to herself, when she noticed that the moisture from
her breath had cleared a portion of the frosted pane just long enough for her to see if Mumtaz was still looking out at her from the living room window.

  She wondered how the Akbars were managing to stay afloat on Mumtaz’s meagre wages. It had been years since that encounter at the mall. It was true that they had not seen each other much, at least not socially, for a good long while, the dinner invitations to each of their homes growing less frequent. Perhaps the bond that had sealed their friendship in the early days was no longer enough to hold them together, not only because of each family’s changing circumstances, but also because the world around them was changing so rapidly. The city itself, like the people in it, had changed dramatically. The Maritime provinces’ drive to make the region a more attractive destination for new immigrants, opening up business opportunities in the oil exploration and renewable energy sectors, had brought in a new wave of wealthy investors from the Middle East and elsewhere. These were desirable contacts that Krishna, as the bank’s Chief Financial Officer, could cultivate with hefty investment incentives, and Radha felt obliged to host with lavish dinner parties, a joint effort that had widened their social circle and social standing in leaps and bounds.

  She had been meaning to invite them to one of their last soirées, but had just assumed that Mumtaz would neither have the energy nor the time. Now she felt a little guilty for allowing it to get to the point that a dinner invitation had to come from the Akbars.

  She assumed Mumtaz was dreading this dinner as much as she was, speculating that the invitation was likely Tariq’s idea for whatever agenda he might have had to get an audience with Krishna. She could not imagine his wanting to be social for any other reason. Probably, he would have pushed for it sooner had it not been for their “situation,” which Tariq undoubtedly preferred to keep under the radar though, again, she had to own up to the fact that his instinct for self-protection was one she shared. Yet, she had also seen enough of Tariq’s temperament to know that “the situation” must have been taking its toll on them, on their marriage, in all kinds of insidious ways. For one, the idea of his wife supporting the family must have been killing him. If anything, his depression must have worsened. To be fair though, she allowed herself to admit, such a thing would likely be the death of Krishna too. After all, what if things had been reversed for them? What if she were the one to find work as a teacher and he wasn’t able to secure a position in his field? What then?