Halfway through my wash-load hanging, Liam appeared, walking towards the house, his long afternoon shadow turning corners before he did. As always, he was wearing his headphones, and I wondered if he was listening to the mixed tape I’d made him for his birthday.
I’d met him at the beginning of Grade 12. He’d transferred from Holy Trinity and at first didn’t go to class, preferring to wander the hallways and occasionally kick a locker door as he passed. He was rumoured to have been expelled from the Catholic school, but no one knew why. Some kids suspected he’d been kicked out for drug use and others had heard that he’d been in one too many fights, but what everyone agreed on was that he was best left a loner. Whenever he walked by, people veered out of his way, and in the crowded hallways he stood apart from the others in what seemed like contented arrogance.
Moments before our first meeting, I was rushing across the field, my face tucked into an armload of books to avoid the sun’s glare. As I approached the school’s main entrance, I saw him scaling the face of the building as if he were Spiderman. Just as I was about to walk by, he jumped down, falling at my feet. Startled, I dropped my books. The bell rang. I was late. I knelt down and began collecting the books, occasionally grasping at my papers as they fluttered in the breeze, threatening to take flight. Liam handed me a stack of papers and a few books.
“History, don’t want to lose that one.”
“Actually, I would. But thanks.” I looked up to take them from him. The sun should have been in my eyes, but he had eclipsed everything.
Later that same day, I’d found myself sitting in front of him in history. The teacher hadn’t arrived and the class was on the verge of the usual an-archy. Liam slumped over his desk, ducking under a paper airplane as he tapped my back with his pen. “Meninder, right?”
“Meena,” I corrected, wondering how he knew my full name.
He squinted and nodded his head as if to say “All right, yeah.” He had a face that was older than his age, a square jawline and blue eyes that changed colour depending on the light.
“You live in the beige house, the one with the fucked-up trees?”
I hesitated not wanting to encourage a conversation. “Yeah, why?”
He leaned back into his chair until the front legs lifted offthe ground.
“So, you want to get out of here?”
“And go where?”
“Does it matter?”
When I said it did, he smirked as if I had missed something obvious, and left the classroom, leaving me alone and surrounded by kids who acted like I didn’t exist.
After class, he was waiting outside and asked if he could walk home with me. After working up the courage, I asked him where he ended up going and he told me, “You know, just around.”
He always said “you know” as though I did know. Somehow it made me think I did.
I pegged the last of the wash on the line and cranked it out towards the remaining patch of sun. Liam stood beneath the porch and looked up at me.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing. I was going downtown, thought you might want to come.” “
I can’t.” I looked to see if my mother had seen us talking. “We’re expecting company and I have some stuffto do around here.”
“Like laundry,” he said, picking up a few of the pegs that I’d dropped. When he started up the steps to hand them to me, I rushed down the stairs, carrying the basket in front of me so he wouldn’t see me in my Indian clothes, though I suspected he would’ve seen beyond them. He never seemed to notice when my hair smelled like curry or when I wore the same clothes two days in a row.
I took the pegs from him.
He was smiling or smirking at me. I couldn’t tell which; his slight underbite made everything seem like a flirtation or dare.
I stood there in Liam’s silence. He was often like this; he didn’t feel the need to speak, to fill in the blanks, to use up air. Talking with him was always a relief.
“Maybe we could do something tomorrow?” I suggested.
“That’d be cool,” he said.
“Meena!” my mother yelled from the window, in a tone that matched the glare she shot at Liam.
“Look, I have to go. See you tomorrow.”
I rushed back up the stairs and took the empty basket inside, walking by Tej and my mother, who were on their way out.
“Gora? A white boy?” my mother snapped.
“He said hi. What was I supposed to do, not talk to him?” I pushed the vacuum into the living room and flicked it on, drowning out any hope my mother had of lecturing me about talking to white boys.
White was the colour of death and mourning; it was the only colour my mother wore apart from grey. In the kitchen, while ironing her chunni, she reminded us how to behave when the guests arrived. Tej listened and replied dutifully in her pitiful Punjabi. Although we’d attended Punjabi summer school when we were kids, her accent was still terrible—she couldn’t say the hard “t’s” the way I could but I couldn’t be bothered to make the effort, and answered my mother’s Punjabi in English. I wondered how much was lost in this routine, which forced us to follow along a word at a time, or a word behind, interpreting what was said even when, for some expressions, there was no translation. My mother would often get frustrated and remind me that when I started preschool the only English word I knew was good-bye. As we walked home from school that first day, I waved good-bye to the bus stop, the lamppost, the trees… My mother yanked my hand, pulling me along, tired of my valediction. “Everything was good-bye,” she told my sisters later.
Steam rose to her face as she pressed the wrinkles from her chunni, the heat forcing her to look up. “Tie up your hair,” and then with one motion of her hand dismissed me to the basement washroom. She didn’t want us to use the upstairs washroom; she’d emptied the garbage and removed the diaper box-sized packs of Kotex that proved this was a house full of women. I’d been mortified when she stuffed our shopping cart full of those discounted maxi-pads at Zellers. I wanted to use tampons like the girls at school but my mother regarded the insertion of such an object as impure. I bought a box anyway and stashed it under my bed, along with the birth control pills Serena bought for me. I was only eleven when I got my first period and since my mother hadn’t let me watch the sex ed. films at school, I was sure I was bleeding to death—I thought kissing made you pregnant. After a day of enduring excruciating cramps and hiding my soiled panties in the corner of my bedroom, I confided to Serena that I was dying. When Serena told my mother that I’d started to menstruate, my mother didn’t speak to me for a week. My becoming a woman so early was a shameful reminder of our sex, of the burdens she bore.
My cramps were awful and I spent the first two days of each month at home, curled on the floor throwing up. After three years of this, my mother finally agreed to let Serena take me to the “woman doctor.” The gynecolo-gist prescribed birth control pills to regulate my cycles and ease my cramps. Serena knew my mother would not approve and made me swear to hide the pills and never tell anyone. I agreed, wondering why anyone would admit to being a virgin who used birth control. It just sounded stupid.
The guests were arriving. I heard the scurry of footsteps above as my mother took her place on the sofa and Tej rushed to get the door. I wondered how many people had come this time. Harj and I had always guessed, making a game of it. It was the only variable part of the ritual and even then it hardly varied. I waited until I heard them go upstairs before peeking into the entrance hall to survey the shoes. I thought that the sensible shoes with the evenly worn soles indicated that one of our guests was an old lady shuffling through life to the end. The gold strapless sandals probably belonged to a new bride still happy to clip-clop through life, and the two sets of men’s dress shoes creased only at the toe belonged to young men whose gait was restrained by entitlement. I slipped my foot into the bride’s sandal and pointed my toes, disappointed that there was nothing Cinderella about it.
I walke
d up the stairs, avoiding the creaky third step, and slipped into the kitchen unnoticed. There I sat at the table, staring at the faded green butterfly wallpaper, counting wings. When my mother called for me, I lowered my head and walked into the room with a tray of water glasses, which I set on the table. My mother cleared her throat, looked at the tray and back at me. I picked it up, offering water to the men first, then to the young woman wearing wedding bracelets and lastly to the elderly woman, the matriarch whose loose caramel skin hung from her jaw. She refused and I set the tray down, waiting to be excused. Harj used to bring the tray in after she’d spat into each glass. But now that she was gone it was my job to offer the water and though I thought of her brazen act each time, I could never repeat it.
“This is the baby?” the elderly woman asked my mother, without taking her coal eyes offme.
“Yes, this is the youngest, Meninder.” My mother gestured towards me in a way that made me feel like I was a parting gift in a game show, something off The Price is Right. “She’ll be eighteen soon.”
The woman feigned a sympathetic smile as I joined my hands in greeting to the group. “Sat Sri Akal.” I offered her an obligatory half-hug. Just like my dadi, she reeked of mustard oil and mothballs.
“You wouldn’t even remember your father, would you?” the woman asked.
I shook my head, pretending that it was some kind of compliment. She inspected me for a moment, pushing my cheeks from side to side, tilting my chin up and down, before touching my head in blessing. I stood there long after she’d sat down, waiting to be excused.
My mother sat on the sofa, head tilted, eyes weepy and withdrawn. I wondered if she were acting or if her grief after so many years could be this real. I’d never seen her cry without an audience; her tears were of little use when there was so much to be done, so many to care for. She never even mentioned my father other than to say how different our lives were when he was alive, how different it would have been had he not died. I always waited on the edge of those sentences, hoping for more. But my mother never spoke of what preceded his absence and I was too frightened to ask. Until I’d discovered it for myself, I didn’t even know his name.
After learning to read, I’d returned to the closet and found, typeset on a half-empty container of penicillin: “Akal.” Years later, while reciting the morning prayer in Punjabi school, I paused on his name:
Ik Onkar
Satnam
Karta purukh
Nirbhau
Nirvair
Akal moorat
Ajuni saibhang.
Gurparshad
Jap.
That was the only prayer I learned, and I repeated it several times before asking my Punjabi teacher what “Akal” meant. She told me that it meant “not subject to time or death.”
I whispered it sometimes—at night as I fell into the quiet possibility of dreams, and even at times like these when I needed something to mute the staid condolences that made loss less than what it was.
“So unfair… such a tragedy… he was so young, such a good man… ” As always, my mother’s face fell, the distance of events blurring behind warm eyes. Her voice cracked, her tone dropping into soft gulps of lapsed grief. “They said it was an accident…there was an investigation…they were sorry…some of them even said it was his fault, but I know he was careful.” She spoke of it in fragments, allowing everyone else to complete her sentences with sympathy.
My father had fallen from the twentieth floor of a luxury high-rise apartment building where he’d been framing the walls. He was proud of his work and boasted about the complex’s amenities: air-conditioned units, an in-ground pool, a private park. It seems strange to me that this building existed somewhere outside our mention of it. That somewhere people were living in these air-conditioned units, pushing their blond, blue-eyed babies in strollers along the very sidewalk where my father lay dead; he’d died instantly. Sometimes I dreamed I was him. Sometimes I dreamed I was the fall. Either way I woke with a screamless breath escaping, my gut twitching into knots. I would lie back loosening them with thoughts of something, and then nothing.
But no matter how many times I dreamed of his death, I could not conceive of it; he was a myth and my mother was a martyr.
“If only he had a son… what can we do… it is kismet.”
I listened to them explain our entire lives away with one word. Apparently, it was my mother’s fate to be a widow with six daughters and our fate to become casualties of fractured lives. Though I struggled against such a predetermined existence, I knew that my sisters and I were all carved out of this same misery, existing only for others, like forgotten monuments that had been erected to commemorate events that had come and gone.
“No one knows why these things happen. Only God knows. Satnam Vaheguruji,” said the matriarch. She joined her hands in prayer towards the lithograph of Guru Nanak that hung above the brick fireplace, before falling silent, nodding to the beat of the grandfather clock that clicked like a metronome. Serena had given it to my mother for her birthday several years ago and since it was too large and cumbersome to fit in the hallway, it was left standing in the living room like a watchman. At the end of each month the pendulum stopped and the clock fell silent until it was wound again—a small reprieve.
Twisting a handkerchief in her fingers, my mother echoed prayer in whispers. I half expected an origami animal to appear out of the cloth. But all that appeared was a distant look on her face that dissolved only when her chunni slipped offher head. She quickly readjusted the fabric and wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Meena will get the chai.” She hurried after me into the kitchen.
“Use the good dishes—the cottage rose china,” she whispered, and ushered Tej in the direction of the silver tray, reminding her not to forget the coasters. “Make sure you let the tea boil after you add the milk,” she instructed, as though we’d never made chai before. But the chai had to be perfect. Something had to be.
My mother returned to our guests composed: the perfect widow in perpetual mourning. I listened to the guests’ dutiful sighs, knowing that they would go back to their homes full of sons thinking Better her than us, and congratulate themselves on their happy lives. After they left, others would take their place. It was a modern version of sati; instead of being burned on her husband’s funeral pyre, my mother was repeatedly singed by their reminders, cremating her life inside herself.
1.2
T he furnace hummed over the sounds of the house settling. I pulled the blinds up. The sun was absent; the sky, a morose canvas of smudged graphite and charcoal. Streams of water trickled down the glass, puddling along the windowsill before settling into the veins of cracked paint. I wrote my name in the condensation and after a moment wiped it away.
I didn’t mind walking to school in weather like this. I hated carrying umbrellas or wearing hats, and submitted to the steady stream of rain. I pulled my Walkman from my coat pocket, put the headphones on and trudged through the puddles and potholes, water seeping into the cracked soles of my shoes. I was listening to Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Harj had said that they were the pioneers of post-punk. She said it was real music, not like the superficial sound bites from rappers that were all mc or dj somebody.
By the time I arrived at school I was soaked and my hair fell in dripping black waves around my face. As I walked down the hallway towards my locker, my shoes squeaking against the shiny linoleum floors, the janitor shot me a disapproving look. I curled my shoulders into my chest, shiv-ering a passive apology.
I dropped my bag into my locker, shook my hair and combed out the knots with my fingers. Warm, dry white kids, driven to school by their parents, paraded past. Girls with syrupy laughs recounted their weekends in giggles that dropped into accusatory laughter when they saw me watching them.
“What are you looking at?”
I clamped my jaw and turned away, pretending I hadn’t heard.
Harpreet was walking down the hall towards me,
spinning a basketball on his finger, performing for the popular girls who had only noticed him since he’d stopped wearing a turban and become the captain of the basketball team. He seemed to have forgotten that the kids who befriended him now were the same ones who had taunted him in elementary school— “Paki! Hindu! Turban twister!” Harpreet had been new back then, and didn’t speak English; he smiled at their insults. He didn’t know enough to be angry, but I did. I’d witnessed my mother’s anger when cars squealed by our house as voices yelled “Paki, go home!” and eggs hit our windows.
One night when my mother’s brother, Mamaji, was visiting, it wasn’t eggs. The window exploded and a firecracker rolled towards me through shards of broken glass. I sat stunned; it looked like a sparkler. Mamaji leaped forward, picked it up and hurled it back out the window. It howled down the street, nipping at the heels of dark figures. Mamaji called to my mother to get the baseball bat that sat by the front door, and together they ran into the night. I wanted to watch from the window but Serena shut the drapes. She tucked us into our mother’s bed, assuring us that nothing had ever been thrown through that window. When they came back later that night, Mamaji was asking my mother why she hadn’t taught the sala kutta gora a lesson when she had the chance. My mother told him that she had taught the boys a lesson, one in compassion. When a dozen eggs hit the window the next night, I knew she wished she’d taught them a lesson in retribution.
Once I’d tried to protect Harpreet from the kids and yelled at them to leave him alone. Two of them cornered me and pushed me down onto the gravel field. I picked up a handful of rocks and stood up slowly, my knees raw. I threw the stones at them until they ran away. When I asked Harpreet if he was all right, he kicked me in the shin.
I waved across the hall to Carrie. She was with Todd. He was good-looking in a Miami Vice kind of way. Carrie was wearing leggings and a miniskirt; several hoops looped their way up her ears, which, I’d told her, was the exact look I would have worn were I allowed to get my ears pierced more than once. We had been best friends in junior high school, but she’d since traded me for the fame that came with being runner-up in the Miss Teen Canada pageant. I envied her popularity and adopted a new group of friends to replace her: the Smart Ethnics. They weren’t fobs, or fresh offthe boat, as we referred to the immigrants who smelled like onions and had body odour that was thicker than their accents. Nor were they dips—the Dumb Indian Punjabs who clustered together like jalebies, driving around after school in their Firebird Trans Ams. They were the ethnics who took all the advanced classes in algebra, thinking this would somehow help them in life just like the French-immersion kids thought that their piss-poor French would land them dream jobs.
Everything Was Good-Bye Page 2