Everything Was Good-Bye

by Gurjinder Basran

  “No, no.” Aman waved her hands in the air. “I’m fine, I’m good—see?” she said, and teetered in an attempt to stand.

  “Just take the cab home and call me tomorrow,” I said, my words trail-ing behind me as I made my way to Sunny.

  “Happy birthday.” I kissed him, trying not to take in any of the whisky on his breath.

  I introduced myself to Jasmine, enunciating the word “fiancée” as I extended my hand, quietly examining her wrists for a scar, some sign of her near love and death. I nestled into Sunny’s arms, closing the space between them. I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d interrupted; there was an enslaved look between them that resembled the intersection of lust and addiction, making me wonder if they were together still or if what haunted them was simply the memory of it. Jasmine noticed me eyeing her scar tissue and pulled her hand away. She folded her arms across her chest before walking away. Sunny reached for his glass, and downed what was left of his drink.

  I stared through the shifting crowd. “Is Kal here yet?” I asked.

  Sunny pulled me closer. “Why are you always asking about him? I’m not good enough for you or something?” The bite of whisky hit the back of his throat, clipping his words to ultimatums.

  “I’m not always asking. I just asked once.” Sunny’s friends were looking at the floor, trying to listen and not listen to our conversation. I could tell by their downturned stares that they were the ones behind his growing paranoia about my friendship with Kal. Sunny pointed to the bar. “He’s right over there, talking to the blonde.” He paused at the end of the sentence as if he were making a point or waiting for me to respond. I said nothing, pretending I didn’t care.

  Sunny smiled, relaxing the hold he had on me when I twisted in his grip, his mood switching from possessive to dismissive in an undefined instant—alcohol intensifying his contradictions. He called one of his friends over and for a time they talked investment speculation while I nodded on the periphery. Sunny never introduced me to his friends. I knew their names and stories only because Kal told me, and they knew me because I was with Sunny and for them that seemed to be enough. None of them engaged me in conversation and any time I asserted an opinion or a thought, Sunny would smile and look at me with a silence in his eyes that was part plea, part reprimand—a chastising and condescending quiet that changed the tone and course of entire evenings. I quickly learned how to disappear and reappear, drifting in and out of conversations on cue, speaking of only those things that mattered to Sunny, surprised that I found some pleasure whenever he was pleased.

  When I mentioned some misgivings to Serena, she told me that I just wasn’t used to the “give and take” of relationship. “I give and he takes?” I asked thoughtfully. And though I was wary of being his silent partner, it was in my own distillation, my own vanishing act, that I won the approval of everyone I knew. The women at my office salivated over his picture on my desk, reminding me how lucky I was to be with someone like him. Even my mother didn’t mind my going out with him anymore. When I was with him, I was almost free.

  The rest of the evening passed through a cigarette-smoke haze that cloaked the patrons in a gauzy shroud, obscuring their intoxicated im-pulses. It reminded me of when Kal and I were first together. He’d think up a way to sneak me out of my house to find the garage-band dives that no other Indians would go to. We’d sit in the darkest corner, listen to music, get drunk enough to talk and not remember later what we’d talked about, and then sit in his truck until sex or the silence after sobered us up. When we sat there, I’d think of Liam, and wonder where he was and who he was with—just like I was doing now. It had been so long that I could hardly remember his face, but occasionally I would see it in the parentheses of a stranger’s smile, the blue of their eyes.

  “Looks like you need a drink.” Kal pulled his bar stool up to mine. “Can’t—I’m driving.”

  He nodded. “Not so fun being the only sober one at the party, huh?” “No.” I watched a crowd of wannabe-me girls flock around Sunny, singing happy birthday. “No, not so fun.” I looked away when I saw Sunny buying yet another round of shots for his friends. He had his arm around Jasmine, his hand dangerously close to her ass.

  “Well, if it makes you feel better, I’m pseudo-sober.”

  “Oh, is that the technical term for it?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is. In layman’s terms it means that although I’ll have a headache in the morning, I’ll still remember our conversation.”

  I laughed. “I’ll have to test the theory tomorrow.”

  “I always remember the things you say, and the things you won’t say.”

  “Pseudo-sober, hmmm?” I squinted. “I don’t know about that… you may just be indiscernibly drunk.”

  “That the technical term for it?” I nodded. “And what do you think is the technical term for that?” he asked, pointing to Sunny, who had just bumped into a waitress, tipping her tray of shots all over her tight T-shirt.

  “Last-call liability,” he said, as we both rushed over.

  Sunny stumbled to the car in a swagger that took up the entire sidewalk. He grabbed my keys and tried the lock, accidentally keying the door and scraping the paint. “Look what you made me do.” He ran his finger over the scratch.

  “Sunny, just give me the keys.”

  He turned around and held the keys above his head, beyond my reach.

  “No. I want to drive. I already told you, I’m okay.”

  “Sunny, no… remember the last time.”

  “I said I’m good.” His glare quieted my attempts momentarily.

  “Please,” I said, reaching across him. “Don’t be like this.”

  He pushed me away. “Fuck, would you just stop. I said I’m fine.” He walked along the raised curb, touching his finger to his nose. “See, I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not and neither am I,” Kal said, running to catch up with us. “Meena, can you drive us both home?”

  Sunny collapsed into the back seat, his whisky madness softening into a sentimental haze. “I’m sorry, babe. Did you hear me, I said I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.” He leaned forward, his head wagging stumbling affections between the two front seats.

  “She heard you,” Kal said. “Now put your seat belt back on and relax.” “My mom is right about you, Meena…she said that you’re a good girl…

  that you’ll be a good wife.”

  “No one is arguing with you, buddy. She is great, now just put your seat belt on.”

  I glanced into the rear-view mirror, unable to see Sunny at all if not for the headlights of the occasional oncoming cars. He leaned forward, and ran his finger along the side of my neck, twirling a piece of my hair around his finger with gentle tension. Frightened and intrigued, I sat up, my posture pushing his hand away. He sat back in a hearty sigh, and though I didn’t look back again, I felt his eyes and his hand’s imprint, his silence hover and shroud. I never knew what to say when he was drunk. Sometimes alcohol induced openness and all his secrets came tumbling out, and at other times he locked himself inside his own mind as if he were protecting me from something dense and angry. I’d seen it in the occasional flicker of his jaw and the flared intersection of veins in his forehead, and always took this as a sign that I should leave him alone.

  I was content to drive in silence, the night passing us in dark sheets, streetlights washing over us in waves, but Sunny couldn’t sit still, and fiddled with the automatic windows, opening and closing them in short bursts. He leaned out the open window, sang a few lines from “Close to You,” and ended with his own line: “I feel love for you, Meena.” Then he closed the window, as if he were taking a bow before a curtain call.

  “I love you, too.”

  “You do?” Kal turned towards me. “You love him?”

  I bit down on my lip.

  “Of course she loves me… Everybody loves me,” Sunny said, his head bobbing as his eyes closed. “What’s not to love?”

  Kal and I he
lped Sunny into the house, his legs dangling at the knees as we shuffled to his bedroom suite, where Sunny crashed, laughing as he pulled me onto the bed with him. Kal left the room while I diverted Sunny’s ill-timed advances, telling him “No, not now” in the moments before he passed out. He only ever touched me when he was drunk, but even then I refused to sleep with him; the idea of being with him before our marriage seemed wrong, as if it didn’t fit his version of me. The only real intimacy we had shared was a botched hand job in the back of his bmw. He’d stared straight ahead for a time, his hand pumping mine, setting the pace he could lose himself in. Eyes closed, mouth parted, he didn’t make a sound except for the occasional grunt as he groped for my breasts in the dark. After fifteen minutes of dissatisfaction, he shoved me away. “Fuck, you’re not even doing it right,” he’d said, zipping his pants up. We sat in the pitch dark, hidden by tinted windows, our frustrations mounting.

  Now, as I rose to leave, Sunny woke, pulling me closer, telling me not to leave him until he was asleep. I lay beside him with the lights out. His body was hot, almost feverish against mine, and as he spoke, I imagined the small words lingering around his lips like smoke, something to be devoured by.

  When he was asleep, I lifted his arm offme and slipped away, carrying my shoes in my hand. Kal was waiting in the living room, standing next to one of the overstuffed couches that flanked each end of the room. All the furniture was pushed against the walls and floating between them was a glass coffee table topped with an obscure sculpture that made the room look like a museum, something for show. “You think he’ll be okay?” I slipped my high heels back on.

  “Yeah, he’ll be fine,” Kal said. “He’ll have a wicked headache, but he’ll be fine.”

  I put on my jacket. “Do you want a ride home?”

  “No, I’m just gonna crash here.”

  “All right then,” I said, digging through my purse for my keys. “I should get going. I don’t want to wake anyone.”

  We stood in the grand foyer, both of us listening to the upstairs sounds of Sunny’s mother snoring in her bedroom. Apart from sleeping, she spent several hours of each day there perched on a La-Z-Boy chair, watching Mahabharat over and over.

  “Wait… Stay, have a drink with me. She sleeps through everything,” Kal said.

  “I should go.” I lowered my voice. “You know how Sunny is.”

  “What, he’s still mad about last week?”

  I nodded.

  “But he was the one who told us to go to the movie without him.”

  “We shouldn’t have gone together.”

  “Is that what you believe or is that what he told you?” Kal walked into the adjacent kitchen and opened and closed cupboards.

  When Sunny had confronted me about going to the movies without him, I’d reminded him that Kal was his cousin. He’d nodded and smiled, “That’s right, he’s my cousin not yours, and you—you’re with me not him.” I didn’t know what to do but agree.

  I followed Kal into the kitchen. “Was he always jealous like that?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. He’s used to getting his way, used to getting what he wants. And right now, you happen to be it.” He pulled out a bottle of wine. “Jackpot.”

  As he uncorked the bottle, I wandered into the family room. Unlike the other room, it was a mishmash of old furniture that hinted at his parents’ working-class days. I sat down on the leather sectional and fiddled with the elaborate stereo system that Sunny had recently purchased. Kal sat on the sofa across from me and handed me a glass of wine. “Sunny hasn’t figured out how to use it yet.”

  I laughed. “That doesn’t surprise me.” My smile faded into silence. “The two of you couldn’t be more different.”

  “Well, I am adopted, remember.”

  “Oh, so you favour nature over nurture do you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m too drunk to know much right now,” he said as he lay down, legs sprawled out over the edge of his sofa. “But even our nurture was different; after all, my parents are the poor relations.”

  “Stop it. You’re hardly poor.”

  “Compared to Sunny’s family we are.”

  “Were you two close growing up?”

  “No, not really. They lived on the island, so we only visited them a few times a year. When we did visit, it was always kind of weird. Our moms don’t really get along and Sunny, well, he was always a jerk.”

  “Ouch. What did he do to you? Steal your girlfriend or something?” I giggled and leaned back into the couch cushions.

  “Ha ha,” he said, mocking me. “No. I knew better than to introduce them to him, that is until now.”

  “I wasn’t exactly your girlfriend.”

  “But you weren’t exactly not my girlfriend either.”

  I looked away, not knowing quite what to say.

  “I guess it’s not really his fault, him being the way he is.” He took a sip of wine. “I mean his mom, you’ve met her, she’s a piece of work. Always bribing him to get him to do what she wants.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh come on, you know. His life has been bought and paid for by his mommy and daddy. In high school his parents gave him a hundred dollars for every a+ he brought home. When he agreed to go to law school they bought him a bmw, and when he agreed to marry you, they gave him the money for his latest real estate venture as a wedding present.”

  “Serious?” I leaned forward.

  He sat up. “I’m sorry; I thought you knew. I heard him talking to you about the investment so I figured you guys had talked about it.”

  “No, he neglected to mention that part.” I took the last swig of my drink and set the glass down. “But I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t change anything.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not too late. You could still change your mind.”

  “It is too late. The invitations have been sent out. The caterers have been booked. Everything’s arranged. My mom… everyone expects me to do this. Nothing has changed that.” I walked over to the window and stared out at the room that was reflected in front of me. Kal got up and put his drink on the table. “So that’s it? You’re really going to go through with it?”

  When I didn’t answer, he stepped closer until he was standing directly behind me, his hands on my hips. I strained my neck to his breath, anticipating a moment of intimacy where I knew there wouldn’t be one.

  2.6

  Icrouched down on the small wooden board that Masi had covered with red silk, my eyes fixed on the intricate and colourful rangoli design she’d created on the ground in front of me. My sisters held a canopied chunni over my head, while my mother knelt by my side and tied a red string around my wrist. She curled and stretched her lips with each twist of a knot until she knew that no one could undo what had been done. Settling into her own satisfied smile, she passed the ball of red yarn to my sisters, who tied a length on all those present.

  My mother called to Masi to say that she couldn’t remember the words to the old songs. Masi sang in her place and my mother strained to find the tune as she scooped the turmeric paste into her palm and smeared it across my forehead and cheeks, cleansing me in ritual preparation for my wedding. She dipped her hands into a bowl of flour and wiped them over my face, pushing the paste into dough, until it fell away, leaving my skin with a smooth saffron stain. My sisters and cousins joined in and rubbed the paste into my arms and legs. Aman stood by, ready to slap any hands that got too close to my hair.

  “Watch the hair, she just had it done,” she kept saying. “For God’s sake, the hair… it has to stay like this until the wedding,” she said, occasionally dousing me in a spray of vo5. “Okay, only a few more minutes. Meenaneeds to have her bath before the photographer gets here,” she pleaded, all the while dispatching my cousins on various errands.

  In the months before the wedding, I’d lived by the weekly checklists and colour-coded calendars that she’d created
for me, each task a new distraction. Every Sunday she had come over and assessed what was left to do, pacing back and forth like a drill sergeant strategizing about colour schemes or planning the next week’s shopping excursion, in which we methodically replaced every item I owned with something new. By now nothing remained of what I had owned or who I had been. Tomorrow I’d leave my mother’s home with a new life wrapped in Cellophane, packed into a series of suitcases or stuffed into the Louis Vuitton trunk that Sunny’s mother had bought for me. When my mother cleaned my closet of its contents, the last thing to go was my box of journals. I came in to find her sitting on the carpet cross-legged, staring at the stack, fingering the print in each one, her eyes troubled as if she had deciphered the meaning. It was then that I knew I couldn’t keep them or leave them behind, so I loaded the box into my car and drove to the beach, where I read each one, flipping and ripping pages, tearing them up until only bits of paper hung from the threaded binding. I placed them into a paper bag and lay them on a float of driftwood, which I carried into the water. As the tide pushed in, I knelt over the bag and lit it on fire. The rising flame singed the ends of my hair before the current and earth pushed the pyre out of reach. I stood still, buried to my knees in dredged silt and seaweed, watching my thoughts bob and capsize until the ocean made me an island.

  “Okay, Okay. That’s enough,” Aman yelled, pushing back the auntie who had elbowed my updo. She stretched her arms out as if she were part of a crowd-control squad and held the others back as I made my way to the washroom. The aunties followed us down the hall, their shrill singing voices penetrating the closed door.

  I sat in the tub, and leaned back until only my breasts were above the waterline. I ran my hands over my body, as if I were cataloguing parts of myself. I turned over and lay face down in the water, ears submerged, dampening and drowning the sound of the aunties during their back-and-forth processions in and out of the house, steel pots and jugs of water in hand. They had started arriving this morning at seven, each of them with their barrel-shaped middle-aged bodies and dishwashing hands invading with offers to help with the food and preparations for the party. There was no spot in the house safe from their prying eyes and spiked advice, and at several points I retreated to my mother’s walk-in closet, to sit waiting beneath the empty embrace of my father’s suits. For what, I wasn’t sure.