by Dohra Ahmad
He did have good fun with them Jamaican, they used to come and tell him how they get lose on the tube, how they wanted to go Piccadilly but they find theyself in Shepherd Bush. And George say that they ‘fraid to put they money in the bank, that they does keep it in a suitcase under the bed, and count it up every week, and when it have enough they sending for they brother and sister and cousin.
Long time George used to feel lonely little bit, but all that finish with since so much West Indian come London. All kind of steel band fête all about in the city, in St. Pancras Hall, down Wimbledon, all down by Pentonville. The boys beating pan in Piccadilly Circus and even jumping up in the road when the Lord Mayor did riding in he coach.
So now all those things George does be studying when the idea come in he head to go back Grenada. He study what he would do if he go back in that small island, and he feel that he would never get on if he go back. It have so many things in London that he don’t agree with, so much prejudice about the place, so much hustling, things so expensive. And yet every year when the spring round the corner, is as if it give him a new spirit to stay.
Then in the summer he putting on jitterbug shirt and walking about, coasting all by Hyde Park in the night, standing up by the corner near Marble Arch listening to them fellars who does stand up on box and say what they like and no policeman don’t interfere with them, and eyeing any sharp craft that standing up near, waiting to ask if she would come in the yard for a cup of tea. He done with English girls now, is only continental he looking for, French and Norwegian in front.
When he have a night off, is because he dressing up and walking from the Water to Trafalgar Square, watching the night life, thinking how he in this big country walking about, instead of sitting down on some concrete bridge over a canal in the West Indies old talking with the boys. Is how you want him to leave this big life?
Is true sometimes when he think serious he could see that he ain’t getting no place in a hurry, that is the same thing he doing everyday. But still, it don’t matter what you do, as long as you living in London, that is a big thing in itself, that alone have big prestige, he could imagine how the people back home when they talk about him how they does say that he is a big shot, that he living in the same place as the Queen. They don’t know how he catching he royal to make a living.
But that was another thing, how London so full up of people that it don’t matter what you do, nobody does mind your business. One time a fellar in a room next to George did dead and nobody know nothing for ’bout a week. The tess stay here all this time, dead, and nobody don’t know nothing even though they living in the same house. That was the one thing used to frighten George sometimes. . . . how he ain’t have no family to watch over him if he sick, and nobody to turn to in hard times. But that thought like a drop in the ocean.
And so year after year the same thing happening again and again. He telling he grandmother and this girl in Grenada that yes, he would come next year, but when next year came he still doing the nightwork in the factory, he still old talking with the boys on a Sunday morning, he still coasting all about the streets of London, with no definite place to go, no definite aim in life.
And it reach a stage now where he get so accustom to the pattern that he can’t do anything about it. All he know is that he living in London, and that he will dead there one day. And that is all. He not worrying he head about anything else. He not even bothering with the colour bar question any more. At first he used to get on ignorant when anybody tell him anything, but now he just smiling like a philosopher when they call him a black man. He can’t even sympathise with them fellars who new and feel the lash for the first time and come round by him to mourn, like when landlord slam door in they face, or people leave them standing up in the queue to attend to somebody else. All them things happen to him already, and he pass through all them stages, so now he does only smile when the boys in sorrow.
Even the winter come like nothing now, he laughing to see Englishman stamping foot in the bus queue to keep warm, while he just have he hand in he pocket standing up cool. And he get a lot of English habit now, like talking about the weather, and if anybody say how it cold he used to talk like an old veteran ’bout the winter this country had some years ago. He drinking tea all the time, and reading newspaper in the tube and bus.
In fact, he and Scottie is good friend now, and the other day he buy a bowler hat and an umbrella and they went for a walk in the park, the two of them talking and nodding they head, and saying good evening to all the sharp girls that pass. He even reading The Times now . . . whenever he going out, he folding The Times so that the name would show and putting it under he arm.
And so as far as he could see, is no more Grenada for him at all. Especially now how so much West Indians hustling up to the old Brit’n, as if things really brown in the islands. And the way he have it figure out, if he stay in the work he have now, he go be able to peel off and spend the summer on the continent. It have a sharp Austrian girl does visit him in the yard . . . she come over here to work as a maidservant for some rich people, and George make contact one night in Baker Street, where she was standing waiting for a bus. Well, she tell him she going back in the summer, and that he must too.
And that is the case. When he think ’bout home it does look so far away that he feel as if he don’t belong there no more. And though he does really miss the sun, he make up he mind to write to grandmother and this girl and tell them that they best hads forget all about him, because he staying in this big country until he dead, and he ain’t coming back to Grenada unless he win a big football pool, and even then, it would only be for a holiday.
SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN
MONTREAL 1962
In the dark at night you came close and your voice was a whisper though there is no one here to wake. “They said I could have the job if I take off my turban and cut my hair short.” You did not have to say it. I saw it in your face as you took off your new coat and galoshes. I heard their voices in my head as I looked at the small white envelopes I have left in the drawer, each full of one more day’s precious dollars—the last of your savings and my dowry. Mentally, I converted dollars to rupees and thought how many people in India each envelope could feed for a month.
This was not how they described emigrating to Canada. I still remember them saying to you, “You’re a well-qualified man. We need professional people.” And they talked about freedom and opportunity for those lucky enough to already speak English. No one said then, “You must be reborn white-skinned—and clean-shaven to show it—to survive.” Just a few months ago, they called us exotic new Canadians, new blood to build a new country.
Today I took one of my wedding saris to the neighbourhood dry cleaner and a woman with no eyebrows held it like a dishrag as she asked me, “Is it a bed sheet?”
“No,” I said.
“Curtains?”
“No.”
I took the silk back to our basement apartment, tied my hair in a tight bun, washed the heavy folds in the metal bathtub, and hung it, gold threads glinting, on a drip-dry hanger.
When I had finished, I spread a bed sheet on the floor of the bathroom, filled my arms with the turbans you’d worn last week, and knelt there surrounded by the empty soft hollows of scarlet, navy, earth brown, copper, saffron, mauve, and bright parrot green. As I waited for the bathtub to fill with warm soapy water I unravelled each turban, each precise spiral you had wound around your head, and soon the room was full of soft streams of muslin that had protected your long black hair.
I placed each turban in turn on the bubbly surface and watched them grow dark and heavy, sinking slowly, softly into the warmth. When there were no more left beside me, I leaned close and reached in, working each one in a rhythm bone-deep, as my mother and hers must have done before me, that their men might face the world proud. I drained the tub and new colours swelled—deep red, dark black mud, rust, orange, soft purple, and
jade green.
I filled the enamel sink with clean water and starch and lifted them as someday I will lift children. When the milky bowl had fed them, my hands massaged them free of alien red-blue water. I placed them carefully in a basin and took them out into our grey two rooms to dry. I placed a chair by the window and climbed on it to tie the four corners of each turban length to the heavy curtain rod. Each one in turn, I drew out three yards till it was folded completely in two. I grasped it firmly at its sides and swung my hands inward. The turban furrowed before me. I arced my hands outward and it became a canopy. Again inward, again outward, hands close, hands apart, as though I was back in Delhi on a flat roof under a hot sun or perhaps near a green field of wheat stretching far to the banks of the Beas.
As the water left the turbans, I began to see the room through muslin screens. The pallid walls, the radiator you try every day to turn up hotter for me, the small windows, unnaturally high. When the turbans were lighter, I set the dining chairs with their half-moon backs in a row in the middle of the well-worn carpet and I draped the turbans over their tops the way Gidda dancers wear their chunnis pinned tight in the centre parting of their hair. Then I sat on the carpet before them, willing them: dance for me—dance for us. The chairs stood as stiff and wooden as ignorant Canadians, though I know maple is softer than chinar.
Soon the bands of cloth regained all their colour, filling the room with sheer lightness. Their splendour arched upwards, insisting upon notice, refusing the drabness, refusing obscurity, wielding the curtain rod like the strut of a defending champion.
From the windows over my head came the sounds of a Montreal afternoon, and the sure step of purposeful feet on the sidewalk. Somewhere on a street named in English where the workers speak joual I imagined your turban making its way in the crowds bringing you home to me.
Once again I climbed on a chair and I let your turbans loose. One by one, I held them to me, folding in their defiance, hushing their unruly indignation, gentling them into temporary submission. Finally, I faced them as they sat before me.
Then I chose my favourite, the red one you wear less and less, and I took it to the bedroom. I unfurled the gauzy scarlet on our bed and it seemed as though I’d poured a pool of the sainted blood of all the Sikh martyrs there. So I took a corner and tied it to the doorknob just as you do in the mornings instead of waking me to help you. I took the diagonal corner to the very far end of the room just as you do, and rolled the scarlet inward as best I could within the cramped four walls. I had to untie it from the doorknob again to roll the other half, as I used to every day for my father, then my brother, and now you. Soon the scarlet rope lay ready.
I placed it before the mirror and began to tie it as a Sardar would, one end clenched between my teeth to anchor it, arms raised to sweep it up to the forehead, down to the nape of the neck, around again, this time higher. I wound it swiftly, deftly, till it jutted haughtily forward, adding four inches to my stature. Only when I had pinned the free end to the peak did I let the end clenched between my teeth fall. I took the saliva-darkened cord, pulled it back where my hair bun rested low, and tucked it up over the turban, just as you do.
In the mirror I saw my father as he must have looked as a boy, my teenage brother as I remember him, you as you face Canada, myself as I need to be.
The face beneath the jaunty turban began to smile.
I raised my hands to my turban’s roundness, eased it from my head and brought it before me, setting it down lightly before the mirror. It asked nothing now but that I be worthy of it.
And so, my love, I will not let you cut your strong rope of hair and go without a turban into this land of strangers. The knot my father tied between my chunni and your turban is still strong between us, and it shall not fail you now. My hands will tie a turban every day upon your head and work so we can keep it there. One day our children will say, “My father came to this country with very little but his turban and my mother learned to work because no one would hire him.”
Then we will have taught Canadians what it takes to wear a turban.
EMINE SEVGI ÖZDAMAR
From
THE BRIDGE OF THE GOLDEN HORN
On Stresemannstrasse at that time, it was 1966, there was a baker’s shop, an old woman sold bread there. Her head looked like a loaf of bread that a sleepy baker’s apprentice had baked, big and lopsided. She bore it on her hunched-up shoulders as if it were on a coffee tray. It was nice going into this bread shop, because one didn’t have to say the word bread, one could point at the bread.
If the bread was still warm, it was easier to learn by heart the headlines from the newspaper which was displayed in a glass case out on the street. I pressed the warm bread to my chest and my stomach and shifted from one leg to another on the cold street like a stork.
* * *
—
I couldn’t speak a word of German and learned the sentences, just as, without speaking any English, one sings ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. Like a chicken that goes clack clack clack. Clack clack clack could be the reply to a sentence one didn’t want to hear. For example, someone asked ‘Niye böyle gürültüyle yürüyorsun?’ (Why do you make so much noise when you walk?) and I answered with a German headline: ‘When household goods become used goods.’
Perhaps I learned the headlines by heart, because before I had come to Berlin as a worker, I had been in a youth theatre group for six years. My mother, my father were always asking me: ‘How can you learn so many sentences by heart, isn’t it hard?’ Our directors told us: ‘You must learn your lines so well that you can even say them in your dreams.’ I began to repeat my lines when I was dreaming; sometimes I forgot them, woke up very much afraid, immediately repeated the lines and fell asleep again. To forget one’s lines—that was as if in mid-air a trapeze artist doesn’t reach her partner’s hand and falls down. But people loved those who carried out their professions between death and life. I got applause in the theatre, but not at home from my mother. Sometimes she had even lent me her beautiful hats and ball gowns for my parts, but when I stopped doing schoolwork because of the theatre, she said to me: ‘Why don’t you learn your school exercises as well as you do your parts? You’ll have to repeat a year.’ She was right, I learned only the lines of plays, even the lines of the others I was acting with. When I was sixteen, I played the part of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Haydi, halka olun, bir peri şarkisi söyleyin
(Come, now a roundel and a fairy song,)
Then for the third part of a moment hence:
Some to kill cankers in the muskrose buds . . .
I couldn’t keep up with school any more. My mother wept. ‘Can Shakespeare or Molière help you now? Theatre has burned up your life.’—‘Theatre is my life, how can my life burn itself? Jerry Lewis didn’t have a leaving certificate either, but you love him, Mother. Harold Pinter left school for the theatre, too.’—‘But their names are Jerry Lewis and Harold Pinter.’—‘I’m going to go to theatre school.’—‘If you’re not successful, you’ll be unhappy. You’ll starve. Finish school, otherwise your father won’t give you any money. You could be a lawyer, you love speaking. Lawyers are like actors, but they don’t starve, do they? Do your leaving certificate.’ I replied:
‘Adi olmayan cinsten bir ruhum (I am a spirit of no common rate).’
My mother replied: ‘You want to make an ass of me and frighten me as if I were your mortal enemy, and you want to kill me with worry. Perhaps I’m partly to blame, but I’m your mother and I’m going to run out of patience soon.’
She wept. I replied: ‘Scorn and derision never come in tears.’
‘My daughter, you are so terribly wild and still so young.’
I will not trust you, I,
Nor longer stay in your curst company.
Your hands than mine are quicker for a f
ray.
My legs are longer, though, to run away!
I didn’t laugh at home any more, because the rows between me and my mother never stopped. My father didn’t know what to do and merely said, ‘Don’t either of you do anything you’ll regret! Why do you force us to speak so harshly?’ I replied:
My lord, fair Helen told me of their stealth,
Of this their purpose hither to this wood.
The sun shone in Istanbul and the newspapers hung outside the kiosks with the headlines: ‘Germany wants even more Turkish workers’, ‘Germany takes Turks’.
I thought, I will go to Germany, work for a year, then I’ll go to theatre school. I went to the Istanbul recruitment office. ‘How old are you?’—‘Eighteen.’ I was healthy and after two weeks I got a passport and a one-year contract with Telefunken in Berlin.
My mother didn’t say anything any more, but instead smoked non-stop. We sat in clouds of smoke. My father said: ‘May Allah bring you to your senses in Germany. You can’t even fry an egg. How are you going to make radio valves at Telefunken? Finish school. I don’t want my daughter to be a worker. It’s not a game.’