That same night Liam stood over the crib watching the rise and fall of Leena’s chest, his finger tracing the outline of her rosebud lips, listening to her soft breath and deep sighs, all the while waiting for her to stir, waiting for an excuse to pick her up and hold her.
When she stirred, he brought her into bed, snuggling her between our warm bodies, and we stayed like that for weeks, existing around her in a pattern of feeding, sleeping and diaper-changing.
When we woke up, the past seemed to recede and for the first time we made plans that were only partly about ourselves.
“We could tear down this wall. Open up the space.” Liam took out a measuring tape. “What do you think?” I didn’t answer. “And out here,” he continued, opening the patio doors, “we can build Leena a playhouse, plant roses, maybe some honeysuckle. I already talked to Kal about it.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Did you now?”
“And up here… ” he was running up to the third-floor attic, “would be your writing studio. You could put the desk here, by the window,” he said, measuring the space. “It’ll be perfect.”
“Liam, I don’t know.”
“Just picture it… just try and see it.”
“I am trying. I just don’t see the need for it. I don’t even write much anymore.”
“Meena, I remember your stack of journals. You write.”
“Keeping a journal is not the same as writing.”
“Is that what you think or is that what your mom told you?”
“Don’t bring my mother into this.” Liam followed me down the stairs.
“You’ve never even met her. What do you know about me or my mother?”
Liam stood behind me at the patio doors where only a few minutes ago we’d been making plans, talking about the future as if the past were another place far from this tree-lined street, far from this house, far from our family. “Look, I didn’t mean it like that.” He put both his arms around me. “I just want you to have all the things that you always wanted. That’s all.”
“I know. I guess I just miss her… I miss talking to her. Sometimes I call her just so I can hear her pick up, just so I can hear her say hello… and then I look at Leena, how beautiful and perfect she is, and wonder why my mom doesn’t want to know her own grandchild. I hate her for that… but I still miss her.”
“She’s your mom. Of course you miss her. I still miss my mother and she left when I was six.” He went on to tell me that after high school he’d found her address in his father’s things and hitched a ride to Saskatoon. When he’d arrived at her house, she was in the backyard, pinning a load of laundry to dry. He’d watched her for a while, not saying anything, mesmerized by the everydayness of the moment—the sheets billowing, the dust gathering, the sunlight in her eyes. “When she saw me she didn’t say anything but my name. And even then it was like a question, her voice raised on the end… We went inside, she made coffee and I sat at the kitchen table staring at the fridge covered in some other kids’ artwork… You know, I’d had all these questions for her, about why she left, but for whatever reason I couldn’t ask them.”
“You didn’t ask her anything?”
“No. It didn’t seem to matter anymore… When I left she gave me a hug and told me that she thought about me every day.”
“Have you talked to her since?”
“No. I don’t see the point.”
“The point is she’s your mother.”
“But she didn’t want to be my mother. That’s why she left. She didn’t have to tell me for me to understand it… I could tell by the way she looked at me, the relief in her eyes when I said I was just passing through.”
“Well, maybe she’s changed.”
“People don’t change—not really. Sometimes you just have to make it easy for them and let them go.”
I nodded, though it didn’t seem easy at all. I couldn’t let go the way he could, because it wasn’t what I’d been taught, because no matter what my mother told me, no matter how harshly she spoke to me or did not speak to me, I knew that she hadn’t let me go, not really. When Harj left home, she could have done what other parents might have done, and removed every bit of her daughter, cutting Harj out of family pictures, burning her clothes and books until nothing was left but the haunting of a smouldering pyre. But she hadn’t done this to Harj, and from what Serena had told me, I knew that she hadn’t done this to me either. My winter coat was still in the closet, my worn paperbacks still lay on the bedside table, and my pictures still rested on the mantel.
All of us—Harj, my father and I—remained with my mother like ghosts, our photo images slowly bleached by the sun, fading away until we became stories. And though they too were fading from my day-to-day life, their voices were still tucked into the corners of my mind, where regrets play on the present and sharpen tongues into bitter daggers that bite everything and taste nothing. My family’s voices, my doubt, their hopes, my insecurity, our dreams all returned half-dead, mummified into new dread, until some days I didn’t want to get out of bed and I nudged Liam to answer Leena’s cries.
Liam left me to sleep, telling me that he understood what I was going through. He’d read countless baby books, and had become an expert on both infant brain development and post-pregnancy hormonal imbalances. When I’d get weepy and sad, he’d bring me tea in bed. “Probably just a touch of the baby blues. You’ll be fine.”
Now as I lay in bed, listening to him in the other room playing with Leena—blowing raspberries on her belly, anticipating the sound of her short squeal—I wondered how he understood so much when I didn’t.
I got out of bed and joined them in the living room, which was strewn with rattles, burp cloths and Liam’s photography paraphernalia. I picked up one of his cameras, lay down on the floor next to him and Leena, and held the camera an arm’s length above us, taking a series of self-portraits that Liam would later frame and hang throughout the house.
3.19
The first snowfall held the city in its breath, casting a tinsel chill across the sky, a silvery glaze on windows and a rosy glow on children’s cheeks. The streets were lined with wreaths, the street corners dressed in charitable causes and the shop windows adorned with nostalgic scenes of foil-wrapped Christmas gifts beneath perfectly trimmed trees. As I walked down Robson Street, past all the windows filled with packaged hopes, I knew that mine would go unopened and wondered what my mother would say when Serena gave her the gifts I sent, what she would make of the picture of Leena.
I meandered in and out of shops, buying a few more things even though I’d already finished my Christmas shopping. Both Liam and I had been ex-travagant, especially with Leena. The hall closet was already crammed with gifts for her and every time Liam brought home another, trying to sneak it in, the others would tumble out onto the floor.
“She’s too young to even remember this,” I’d told him when we decorated the elaborate tree.
He’d smiled, that smile that always made me feel two steps behind, and said, “But we will.”
This was what I thought as I lined up to pay for another rattle to stuff into her stocking. Around me, shoppers pulled out their wallets and the cashiers conversed with one another about their own Christmas plans as they counted back change. “You’re so lucky you’re offearly, Harj,” one cashier said to another. I dropped the rattle when I saw her, and as I bent over to pick it up she walked by me, the scent of her Lily of the Valley perfume lingering. I stared at the front door that she’d just walked out of and left my purchase behind to hurry after her—in and out of stores, across streets, observing her from a safe distance until she was about to enter the train station and I thought I’d lose her. I called out.
She turned, squinting at me as if I were out of focus. “Meena?”
We didn’t hug. We stumbled in our own surprise, grasping at the familiar in each other although we were so obviously unfamiliar—listing the details of our lives over the din of commuters, every other word
muted by passing traffic and the street performer who played classical violin for pennies. Every time I looked at her, really looked at her, she lowered her eyes and the rush of the oncoming cars swept her hair across her face like strands of cobwebs. She wasn’t as I had remembered her—still tall, but now somehow stretched, as if all of her features had been pulled up; her once-chiselled face now seemed edgy, her cheeks like cliffs and her eyes like caverns.
“Do you have time for coffee?” I asked.
She looked down the street, a little unsure, before saying, “Sure… I know a place close by.”
We sat down by the window, our table pushed close against the next one, where a couple sat talking on their cellphones, shopping bags crowded around their feet.
“Don’t you hate that,” Harj said, without waiting for a response. Her questions were always statements, leading you into ways of being and thoughts that weren’t necessarily your own. “I hate it when people talk on their phones instead of talking to each other.” She said it just loud enough that the couple heard and inched their chairs away from ours. “So, how’s Mom?” She asked it in a matter-of-fact way that was almost cutting.
I unbuttoned my jacket. “She’s fine. I don’t see her much since… ” I paused and Harj waited, gesturing for me to continue, hurrying me along, nodding in an I’ve-heard-it-all big sister manner as I explained what had happened.
“So she wrote you offtoo.”
“No. It’s not like that. She didn’t write me off, and she didn’t write you offeither. She just needs time.”
“Well, kiddo, I hate to break it to you but I haven’t talked to her for over fifteen years. That’s a lot of time.” She took a sip of her coffee, and her cup banged against the saucer when she put it down.
“You could call.”
“She didn’t want to hear from me just like she doesn’t want to hear from you.”
“That’s not true.” I thought of Leena and how nothing could ever keep me from my daughter. My mother always said that one day I’d understand and I wondered if I was finally beginning to. “We’re her daughters. We’re all she has.”
“Well, good thing she still has four more she can talk to.” Harj leaned her face against her cupped palm and stared out the window. “Remember when we were little we used to fog up the bathroom mirror and draw all over it? You only drew love hearts and happy faces.”
“And you wrote swear words.”
She laughed at the recollection. “It wasn’t all bad.”
“No, it wasn’t… You know, we all missed you. After you left. I’m sure that if you called now… ”
She shook her head no, tossing the idea away, and we fell into silence, allowing other people’s conversations to filter into ours, picking up awkward threads about movies, Christmas plans and books, small talk filling up space, taking up time.
“So… ” She paused, straining for something. “You mentioned you were writing. What is it? A tell-all book?”
“Hardly… there’s not much to tell.”
“Who are you kidding?”
I smiled. “Apparently no one… I guess I just feel kind of funny writing about family… That’s probably why my work is all over the place… It’s all pretty raw and kind of scary.”
“Why scary?”
“Mostly the idea of anyone reading it.”
She sipped her coffee. “Truth is a scary thing.”
“You sound just like Liam.”
“He must be a pretty smart guy then.”
“Yeah… he’s been really encouraging. We’ve even talked about my going back to school after maternity leave.”
“That’s great. You were always a good writer. I remember your diaries were very detailed.”
I sat stunned for a moment. “You read them?”
She laughed again. “Only the good parts… but seriously, I’m really glad you have someone to support you. Lord knows we didn’t grow up with that.”
“Mom did her best.”
“We all do,” she conceded.
Later, when we headed back to the train station, I wondered if I would be like her, looking in on the past as if it belonged to someone else. When she answered all my questions with vague answers, I knew she was content to end our conversation, leave everything unsaid and undone. Somehow I understood this self-imposed exile that kept us all in a loose orbit of one another, the controlled distance a delusion of freedom. We stood on the platform together, watching people rush back and forth in steady deter-mination. When our trains pulled in on the opposing tracks, we hugged briefly, both of us heading in different directions.
3.20
Iwas getting dressed, tying my sari for the third time, trying to get the folds even, when Liam came in. He stood in the doorway, tapping his watch. “The babysitter’s here.”
“I just can’t get it straight,” I said, tucking the pin through the folds. “Maybe we should just forget it. I don’t want to go anyways.” I flopped down on the bed.
“We already missed the wedding. We can’t miss the reception as well.” Liam picked up the pile of fabric on the floor, sat down on the edge of the bed, and handed the material to me. “They’re our friends.”
I sat up. “Irmila is not my friend.”
“Well, Kal is. He’s always been there for you and besides if it wasn’t for him we might not even be together right now. So hurry up and get dressed.”
I didn’t move.
“Come on, Meena. We’ve been through this already.”
I still didn’t move. “I just think our going is a bad idea.”
“Why? Is this still about Sunny?”
I nodded. I hadn’t seen him since Leena’s birth, though at times when the phone rang late at night and no one was on the other end I was sure it was him. Once when Liam and I had come back from taking Leena for an evening walk, I thought I saw his car turning offour street, but Liam was sure I was imagining things.
“It’ll be fine. You said it yourself. It’s a big wedding. We’ll be seated at different ends of the banquet hall and we probably won’t even see him.”
I raised my eyebrows, still not convinced. “Tell you what, let’s just go and see how it is. If you feel uncomfortable, we’ll leave.”
“Ohhhh-kay.” I got up reluctantly.
“It’s just weird,” I said. “All those people… I haven’t seen most of them since I left. I can only imagine what they’ll think when they see us.”
“They’ll think what they want to think. People do.”
I nodded, and fiddled with the sari pleats obsessively. “I suppose.”
“It’ll be fine. Now hurry—we’ll be late.”
I grabbed his wrist and checked the time. “No we won’t. It’s Indian standard time: everyone will be late.”
He turned me around and pulled me closer. “Well then, in that case,” he said, wedging his fingers at my waist, pulling at the pleats. I smacked his hand away. “We don’t have time. I still have to do my makeup and put on my jewellery.” I reached for an armload of red-and-white bracelets. “Not to mention I haven’t told you about the party rules.”
“What rules?”
“Well, they’re unwritten rules about propriety. Indian people, married or not, do not show any public affection.”
Puzzled, Liam ran his hands along his perfectly stubbled jawline. “But love is the plot line of every Bollywood movie.”
“Yes, but no one actually kisses in a Bollywood movie. They may sing and dance about love, but there is always a cleverly placed tree or a fuzzy camera shot to obscure any moment where a kiss should be… Anyways, back to the list:
“No touching
No hand holding No hugs
No kissing
No eye contact
No visible affection No flirting
No talking to women, and
No allusion to the fact that we are more than friends.”
“So I should pretend that I’m your brother?”
“Yeah, kind of. Oh, and
you have to get my drinks for me because women aren’t supposed to drink.”
“Okay. So I’m to act like your brother and your bartender?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Will your mother be there?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And does she know that I’m coming with you?”
I nodded again.
“Is she okay with it?”
I paused. “She’ll have to be.”
On the way there he asked me to teach him a few words of Punjabi so he could speak to my mother, and by the time we got there he’d mastered some phrases.
“Sat Sri Akal.” Liam folded his hands and knelt down to touch my mother’s feet just as he’d seen people do in Hindi movies. She grabbed his shoulder to stop him from the embarrassment and dismissed him with a hasty “Hello.”
We sat at a table at the back of the reception hall, close to the balcony doors above the entrance—the congregation place for all the fringe Indians, including the divorced and interracially married couples.
“So this is what you meant?” Liam said as an auntie walked by, her whip-lash stare so obvious that it seemed to crane every neck our way. Though we hadn’t tried to draw attention to ourselves, it seemed that everyone knew we were there and yet pretended that we weren’t, all of them walking around us, making a point of not talking to us.
After dinner Liam and I congratulated Irmila and Kal, who were re-ceiving their guests in a long line. Irmila hugged and kissed everyone without managing to touch anyone. When it came time to embrace me, she leaned in, her lips poised but only hovering over my cheek. Kal hugged me tight, whispering in my ear that he was so glad we’d come. It was enough to have made the evening worthwhile.
As we made our way back to the table, I saw Sunny sitting with his parents. His father saw me looking and smiled in that ironic way he always did. The upturn of his mouth and the slight shrug of his narrow shoulders suggesting he was somehow responsible for life’s small agonies simply because he understood them, accepted them.
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