“Short.”
“I guess that’s why they have big hair,” he said, smiling. “Napoleon complex meets Vidal Sassoon.”
I laughed as I pulled the Simple Minds record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable and lowered the needle on “Don’t You Forget About Me.”
“She should have ended up with Bender?”
“Huh?”
“In The Breakfast Club—Molly Ringwald, she should have stayed with Bender.”
“The Breakfast Club? Was that the one with the quintessential dweeb named Duckie?”
“No, that was Pretty in Pink.”
“Seen one John Hughes movie, seen them all.”
“That’s not true. They’re kind of different.”
“How? They’re all about white suburban kids with no real problems, except for that Ally Sheedy character in The Breakfast Club. She’s morbid, a bit like you.”
“I’m not morbid,” I said, flopping down next to him on the bed.
He picked up the paper and handed it to me. “I saw you reading the obituaries.”
“I glanced at them… what’s wrong with that? The paper is filled with stories about life and death. I was just reading the abbreviated versions.”
“So, Miss Morbid, have you spent time on what you want your obit to say?”
I folded the paper. “No—but I know what I don’t want it to say.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I don’t want it to use the phrase ‘survived by.’ It’s such a euphemism. Why not just list the people who were left behind rather than say that the deceased was survived by. I can’t imagine you actually survive the loss of a love, you just bear it, and you just go on until you become someone else so you can forget who you were … how you were.”
“Do you think that’s what your mom did?” Liam turned towards me, propping himself on his elbow. He waited in my silence, both of us staring at each other as if we were playing a game of chicken, waiting to see which of us would give in. Me. Always me. I tossed the newspaper onto the floor and walked back to the window. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“Darwin,” he answered.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, my grandmother got him for me when I was in Grade 10 as some kind of compensation for making me go to Holy Trinity.”
“I can’t believe you ever went there.”
“Tell me about it. That’s why I named the dog Darwin. It was my first attempt at religious rebellion.”
“There were more?”
“Yeah, I did whatever I could to get them to kick me out of school.”
“Like?”
He sat up straight and put his encyclopedia down. “Well, for start-ers I quoted Nietzsche and questioned everything. In religious studies, I pointed out that if Mary Magdalene was a prostitute it was likely that Jesus was a john. In English I wrote an essay called “Jesus, Portrait of a Coloured Man,” arguing that, based on anthropology, Jesus could not have been white.”
“How long before they kicked you out?”
“A whole year. They wanted to save me, that is until they caught me making out with Jennifer Milton in a confession booth… her dad donated tons of money to the school. Needless to say, I was expelled the following week.”
I laughed even though I felt a pang of jealousy in my stomach. “So this Jennifer person, was she your girlfriend?” I sat down next to him, my thigh brushing his.
“No, I’ve never had a steady girlfriend. But there is this girl I like.” His palm grazed my leg. I stared at it, half expecting it to have left a mark.
My voice caught in my throat and rattled out, “Really?” I tried to seem disinterested and flung my legs over the side of the bed, my back to him as I picked up an encyclopedia and flipped through the pages for a few minutes. “You should tell her.”
“I’ve thought about it. But if I told her that I like her then everything may change. I may lose her—I don’t think I could survive that.”
I stopped flipping pages, tentative and almost frightened as I turned towards him. “Yeah, but if you never tell her, you won’t know if she feels the same way.”
He stared at me until the slightest smile formed on his lips. “She’ll know it by what I don’t say.”
I picked up an encyclopedia and lay down on my stomach next to him, both of us quietly flipping through pages, not reading a word.
As I walked home I wondered if the aunties on the street had seen me leave Liam’s house, and if they did, whether they would report back to my mother. My sisters and I referred to them as the Indian Intelligence Association. As members of the iia they were induced by their morals to spend their afternoons looking out windows, gathering gossip and deli-cious details that they spread through a game of broken telephone. They were a blend of town crier and gossip columnist who spun stories like webs, occasionally devouring victims like my sister Harj.
Two years before, she’d been walking home from the bus stop when a group of dips in a yellow Trans Am followed her home. They’d been following her every day for a week and every day she’d come home in tears, too ashamed to repeat the things they had said. She knew not to turn around, not to pay them any attention, but the sound of their car rolling over the gravel made her skin prick with fear and like animals, they sensed it. It was the only encouragement they needed that day.
They pulled their car up beside her and one of the boys jumped out, grabbing the back of her arm, pulling her against his body, laughing as she begged for him to let her go. The aunties must have watched from behind their sheer living-room draperies, they must have heard her cries, they must have seen the trail of dirt and stones as the car careened away, because when she came home my mother had already been told that my sister had gotten in a car with a group of boys.
Harj tried to explain what had happened, that she had been grabbed, driven to an empty lot… Her words fell back, swallowed in open-mouthed sobs. My mother slapped her. “Stop it! Stop it! Not another word!” she’d yelled. Serena rushed to Harj’s side to save her from more injury. My mother dropped her hand, her eyes full of the questions she saved for God.
Harj, who had studied sociology in university, once told me that we were a natural target for judgments: a family already wounded was easy prey for a community that often turned on itself. She ran away a few months later. Despite my mother’s attempts at reconciliation, she would not return home. Tej and I visited her once, and though we were appalled by the squalor of her Eastside apartment—the mousetraps in the corner, the red-bricked views, the black mildew on thin-paned windows—we said nothing of it. Her roommate, who I later realized was her boyfriend, was sitting on a plastic patio chair by the window, chain-smoking cigarettes. Harj didn’t introduce us; she acted like he wasn’t even there and made us jasmine tea from small green packets she had taken from the Chinese restaurant she worked in. “So how is Mom… Serena… A.J.?” She asked after everyone, the way we were taught to do, and we summed up family health in small reassuring statements that opened to truthful sighs.
“What will you do?” Tej asked. “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Perhaps admitting it out loud frightened her, because for the rest of the visit she stared out the dirt-streaked window without saying a word. When we came home, my mother called us into the kitchen where she was making roti. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or if the dry heat offthe cast iron tava had simply settled onto her cheeks. “Goapy Auntie called. She said she saw you in the city today.”
“She’s wrong.” I glanced at Tej. “I was at school and Tej was… ” Before I could finish my sentence my mother lifted her hands from the tava and hit me. “Liar!” I fell back and reached for the counter to steady myself, but only managed to grab hold of the stack of plates piled on it, pulling them down with me.
My mother turned the stove offand walked to her room, where she stayed barricaded for the next two weeks. She ignored our knocks, our pleas at the door, our tear-soaked apologies.
The only person she would speak to was her brother. Mamaji came by once a day, and each time he emerged from her bedside I looked into the room to see my mother lying in the near-dark, discarded tissues piled on the nightstand next to empty teacups. Once she saw me peeking in, and told me in a small voice to come inside. I hesitated, my steps short and heavy, approaching with the trepida-tion of a child looking upon the old and infirm. I sat on the edge of her bed, saying nothing as I listened to her breath fall into a sedated sleep— slow and rhythmic, perfectly prescribed. As I rose to leave, she startled and clasped my hand, looking at me as if I were a stranger, the edges of her reality softening into the mercies of sleep. I sat in the dark watching the little light there was play on her face like a language of dreams. I lay next to her and slept there for the next year.
Occasionally Harj sent me a card. Any time one arrived, my mother stared at it for a long time before asking me to read it to her, and then was disappointed that all it ever said was: “Missing you. xoxo Harj.” Sometimes my mother would buy a box of ladoos and send it to the return address. I told her that Canada Post would not deliver ladoos to a po box, but she insisted on sending them. They were Harj’s favourite. My mother was always saddened when the crumpled box of sweets was returned stamped “Address Unknown.” She took the contents—broken bits, sugary yellow crumbs—and scattered them on the front lawn. “For the crows,” she’d say.
I stopped in front of our home, looked around, and through the front window of the house across the street saw an auntie standing in her living room. I wondered if she was clocking me or whether she was wondering, as was I, why there were so many cars in our driveway. I rushed inside to find out. The house smelled like an Indian sweet shop; the intense aroma of ghee filled the spaces between chatter and smiling voices. I hadn’t heard such bright voices since Harj had left.
“What’s going on?” I asked Serena, who was standing in the kitchen with Masi. Masi smiled and took offher glasses. She handed me a large, folded aerogram. I opened the knifed edge and pulled out a 4x6 studio portrait of a young Indian man. The constipated expression on his face belied the seemingly thoughtful posture he had assumed, with his arms folded across his chest. The edges of the photo were softened and air-brushed, not at all like the edgy and candid portraits Liam liked to take.
“He is handsome, isn’t he!” she said, clapping her hands.
“Yeah, I guess—who is he?”
She grabbed my shoulder, shaking and hugging me with a force that was greater than her five-foot frame. “This is Kishor Auntie’s nephew. He is here from England looking for a bride.”
“Kishor Auntie?” I had always thought it strange to call every Indian woman, related or not, “Auntie.” Harj had told me that she thought giving strangers titles was a way to rebuild our villages outside of India; adopting the appearances of community was easier than creating a real one.
“Yes, you know the lady that I carpool with. When I heard about her nephew I showed her a picture of Tej and she asked if they could come over for tea and meet her.”
“When?” I hadn’t taken my eyes offthe photograph. The suitor looked typically Indian: lentil eyes, a pakora nose and thin lips. His shortcomings were made somehow handsome by a mall glamour shot.
“Tonight. They will be here tonight.” Masi’s smile grew wider as she clasped her hands to her chest and looked behind me. “Oh, Tejinder, look at you, you almost look pretty!” I turned around. The perpetual scowl that stretched across Tej’s face, wrinkling her forehead and pinching her nose, had disappeared; her face had softened, as if someone had smoothed out her fleshed disappointment. “Maybe a little powder, heh?” Masi suggested, reaching into her purse for a compact. “Even out your complexion a little more. I think you have been getting too much sun.”
My mother came rushing into the room, her hands busily knotting her hair into a bun, her mouth holding the pins that would keep it in place. She stopped as she looked at me, and unclenched the pins from her frown.
“Meninder, change your clothes, you know you should not be wearing such things,” she said, pointing at my skirt.
“What’s the big deal? I’m not the one they’re coming to see.”
She poked the pins into her hair. “He has a twenty-year-old brother;
God willing, he may be perfect for you.”
Masi clapped her hands. She was always clapping her hands, as if she were aware of a rhythm to life that we could not hear. “Oh, what an idea! Two brothers marry two sisters. Just like a Hindi movie.”
“Those movies always end badly,” I said. “Someone either dies or kills for true love.”
My mother offered a tight-lipped smile. “Love shmov! That is best left to movies. Now, go change your clothes.”
That afternoon we rolled gulab jamun in coconut flakes, scattered pis-tachio crumbs on burfiand prepared the dough for samosas. Masi rammed her fist into the dough and tunnelled her fingers through, reaching out the other side, folding the dough in on itself while singing “Mere Jeevan Saathi”—My Life Partner. She batted her eyes and teased Tej with the hip-twitching choreography of a Bollywood sequence, dancing around the kitchen with a jug of water balanced on her head, until we all collapsed into laughter. Even my mother grinned. We sat end-to-end, filling the dough cones with potatoes and sealing them with milk, Masi’s chatter filling the space between tasks. “When I was your age, girls did not meet their husband… until the wedding night,” she said, wheezing with laughter.
My mother elbowed Masi, recalling that when Masi’s betrothed had come to see her, she’d hidden in a tree. “I had to climb up the tree to get her and by the time we came back to the house, they had left,” my mother said.
“Well, no one was as lucky as your mother in marriage,” Masi said. “Your father: so kind and handsome… The village girls swooned any time he came around. He looked like he was from a Bollywood film, a young Dharmendra riding around on his motorcycle, hoping to get a look at your mother. You know, he had come to see our cousin, but when he saw your mother he asked for her hand instead.”
“Mom, you never told us that,” Tej said.
“Oy, oy, enough of this. We are falling behind,” my mother said, heating the frying oil, a flustered embarrassment about her.
It was two hours of assembly-line work that was full of gossip, the occasional giggle fit and my mother’s momentary culinary concerns turning to full-scale cooking catastrophes when she lamented the loss of one overstuffed samosa that had burst at the seams and tainted the frying oil with bits of potatoes. “Oh, ho, now look what has happened,” she said over and over, slapping her forehead.
“No matter,” Masi said, fishing the remains out with a ladle. She wrapped her arm around my mother’s shoulder. “Everything will be fine. Everything will work out.”
I watched from the kitchen as Masi led our guests into the living room, where my mother greeted them. Kishor Auntie waddled to the couch like a fat duck struggling to get to water. She dabbed at the sprays of sweat on her temples with her chunni. The young man, whose name was Mandip, was shorter and darker than he’d looked in his picture. He sat down and examined the shag carpet, not looking at anything but his mismatched sport socks while Kishor Auntie verified our ancestry.
“Pind kera?” she asked, removing the chenille cardigan that had been stretched over her massive bosoms. I thought of the Indian woman who had sat next to me on a bus the previous week. She’d stared at me even though I was staring straight ahead, and as I shuffled in the discomfort of her glare she asked me, “Pind kera?”
I wanted to yell at her and say “Who cares? You’re in Canada now? What difference does it make what village my father was from or what caste I am.” But instead I lowered my head and answered respectfully just as my mother did.
“Patial.”
“Kishor Auntie smiled and leaned forward, her breasts resting on her distended abdomen. “We have relatives not far from there.”
“Well then, we are practically famil
y!” Masi exclaimed. Everyone nodded and laughed nervously.
I listened until the laughter hummed into loose sighs. Our house was full of this sound each time one of my sisters got married. For days before the wedding, the house was a festival brimming with family, food and ritual happiness. Uncles, aunts, cousins—the real, the distant, the removed and the pretend—descended on our home from cities near and far to sleep on rolled-out blankets in whatever space there was. It was like a three-day carnival that, upon completion, left us with a shag carpet full of confetti. When my sister Parveen got married and moved away to Edmonton, her father-in-law assured my mother that she would be treated as his daughter. He told her that daughters are not born into their true families, and must marry into them. Though my mother knew his intentions were good, I could tell by the glaze in her eyes that she was wondering, as was I, why such good intentions reduced us to less than ourselves.
I snuck into Tej’s room, where she was pacing back and forth, flattening the shag carpet while muttering, “Sat Sri Akal Auntie” in various pitches trying to find the most pleasing tone. “Is it time?” she asked.
“For you to serve tea? No, not yet.”
She paced the length of the room again before sitting me down on the bed. “Tell me then, what are they like?”
I told her that Kishor Auntie was fat and smelled like patchouli, but had kind eyes and that Mandip seemed sincere. Sincere—that was the nicest way I could describe his hunched shoulders and insecure gaze.
“Do you think that we would look good together?”
I smiled. “Yeah, I think you’d make a really nice couple.” She looked relieved and threw her arms around me. I was taken aback by her unchar-acteristic affection, but steadied myself to her embrace. “So, is this what you want?” I asked.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I should want to fall in love, right?”
“Well, yeah. Don’t you want to choose who you love?”
She turned away. I knew she must be thinking of Preet. Although they’d just been friends, everyone had hoped it would amount to something more. I remember her crying his name on the phone, demanding to know how he could go to India to marry someone he didn’t know, someone he didn’t love. I wondered if he’d answered her between her gulping sobs. I wondered if he’d had the courage to tell her the truth that we all suspected—that since Harj’s departure we had become an even less suitable family to marry into.
Everything Was Good-Bye Page 6