by Kim Echlin
We got recorded live one night at George’s by the national radio who were recording Nimmons ’N’ Nine. The sound guy said to Mo, I’m gonna record your band, and he wrote down our names and when I listened to the show later the announcer said, Katherine Goodnow is new on the scene and she seems to be playing for two. She’s got a sound people are going to be listening for. She’s an original.
I wondered if Ma heard it and hoped she didn’t because she would not have liked that crack about me being pregnant.
After the shows I went back to wherever we were staying and when T came in later we made love, quieter now. One early dawn I said, T, I think we need to make some adjustments. But he kissed me and started all over again and when the rising sun turned the cheap motel curtains dirty pink, he said, No adjustments necessary, babe, you are perfect.
Phones were expensive so Ma and I used to write postcards and she’d mail them to the clubs. She sent me a surprising one after Christmas. The front was a picture of a floral clock in Niagara Falls and on the back she wrote, Guess who’s got a date for New Year’s Eve? I bought silver slingbacks. Happy New Year!
I wrote back on a picture of a Mountie, Who’s taking you?
Her reply was on a chipmunk in a forest. You won’t remember. A fellow called Sean. I knew him in high school.
Of course I remembered him. He was the only man who ever told me she was great. I saw him around at the Connaught. Then she got rid of him and never mentioned his name again. He seemed to be back.
After New Year’s when we played George’s I wrote on a card with a picture of the Royal York, the tallest building in Toronto, How’d it go? Happy New Year to you too!
She wrote back on a picture of the Stelco steel mills, Not my type. When are you coming home for the baby?
I had this half-baked worry that something might happen to me like happened to Ma. I heard the Children’s Aid Society could ask questions about whether a woman smoked or drank or went to the movies. I figured playing in clubs with a band of Negro men might not be on the social workers’ to-do lists. I was married but I thought I better get under the radar because in those days pregnant women weren’t allowed to be teachers or to work anywhere. I didn’t know what we were allowed to do and I didn’t know how to find out and I wasn’t going to be called unsuitable to keep my baby.
More students were getting arrested for sit-ins and sneaking into segregated theatres and Martin Luther King said that it might take more jail to arouse the dozing conscience of the nation. In Hamilton things felt different but Ma said in a bitter and hurt way, Just scratch and you will see what is under the surface anywhere. Hipsters were playing music and reading poetry describing America as an empire, a hellhole, a freedom-place, a prison. I was fascinated by student non-violence and speeches about supporting any friend and opposing any foe and letting the oppressed go free and paying the price and bearing burdens. The rhythms appealed to me but T wasn’t very interested. He said, I don’t know, KK. I got a Moslem name so I could travel as a white guy.
Then he showed me his American cabaret card with his other name, Talib Salaam, because he had converted to Islam, like Rudy Powell and Idrees Sulieman. A lot of jazz musicians were doing the Islam thing in those days because the law said if they were Moslems they were not Negroes anymore—and they could go into restaurants and bring out sandwiches and coffee.
I said, I didn’t know. You never showed me. What’s Talib Salaam mean?
T laughed and said, Lots of things you don’t know, babe. Talib’s for T and Salaam just means peace. When I saw guys blacker than the inside of a chimney with White on their cards because they converted, I did it too so I could not be a nigger anymore.
Where?
Prison. Cats in prison talked about Allah and all that. Katie, you talk about non-violence but you don’t know.
T ’n me made a silent commotion inside people who passed us on the street when we walked together holding hands and it bothered T but I always felt right. People could look at me however the hell they wanted. I was used to being different with Ma. Sometimes he would drop my hand if he thought someone was staring and I would take it again. I said, We’re better than them.
Babe, I been in places where there’s effigies of niggers hanging from church steeples as a warning. Last time I played the South, there was a manager who wouldn’t let me in. He said, This is a white dance, and I said, My name is on the marquee out here. He sent me round to the back door and I did the gig and I walked the bar, but I got a fever on stage, ran out to throw up. I came back in, finished and left. I did not stay to pick up my money. I could not look out one more time on those faces dancing to my music.
Like mine?
Babe, you don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.
What about our baby?
Well, that’s your fault. You got me all excited.
So we laughed it away and we could be sexy as hell up on the stand but not walk down the street. T ’n me preferred the night. In Hamilton clubs, Negroes and Mohawks and Chinese and whites were mixing it up.
I asked him, When am I going to meet your momma?
Ain’t gonna happen, babe, we can’t go to the Big Lick together and she don’t travel.
There was a bottomless pain in T that he did not want to touch so I did not touch it either. I did not realize that things can suddenly whip up from underneath and claw at you like a nervous cat. I just kept going.
MAHSA
The Sweeper worked at the Holy Family Hospital on Aga Khan III Road where there has always been a good maternity ward. She stole a speculum and dilators and a curette for the little business that she ran with her midwife friend. A dishwasher at the Beach Luxury told me about her. The first time I went alone and I was afraid to knock on the unmarked door in the mohalla. But a bigger fear gave me courage and when the door cracked open I said, I heard you help girls who are pregnant, and the Sweeper moved back to let me pass inside. I was wearing my school uniform. Two women asked things like how long I had known and my age and I showed them my money which was not enough. I said, I will get more, and the midwife said, You should not wait too long. Come back in four days. The Sweeper would not tell me her name and she called the midwife Rabia.
Are you sure it will work?
I’m sure.
I told the girls at school I was collecting money for an Aga Khan children’s charity. That’s how I paid for my abortion. The third day of my fundraising, one of the sisters brought me to her office. I was afraid she was going to take the money away from me and I hid it in my underwear. But she gave me a cup of tea, told me how proud the school was that I had taken the initiative to work for a charity though I was a girl who had suffered a great deal. She congratulated me on my exams.
In went the speculum, twist twist opening twist twist and the Sweeper was holding a light for Rabia whose hair was completely covered and the lines of her face looked angular and harsh. She pushed in the dilators and stretched me until I felt open like the mouth of a river. The Sweeper gave me a rag to bite on and hissed in my ear, Chup raho. Don’t get us in trouble.
It was the beginning of many forced silences. I bit down on the rag that tasted of cotton and soap. I squeezed the Sweeper’s hand, and when I could bear no more Rabia finally said, Ahcha, and I lifted my head to see, but the Sweeper said, Oh no, do not look, some girls faint, lie down.
But I did see the basin of blood, flesh, end-of-the-world mess.
Rabia said again, Ahcha, and removed the dilators and loosened the blades and slid the speculum out of me and packed between my legs with old cloth and said, You did well. Now. You will stay here for two hours. Do you see my fingers? Place your fingers from both hands like this and massage here, over your uterus. This will help it to contract and it will stop the bleeding and the cramps.
I had never heard a woman name these things. Now that she was not inside me anymore her lined face seemed not as cruel as I had thou
ght, and her eyes were kindly. The Sweeper said I must go back in a taxi and she would call one they knew and that I should have brought someone to help me.
The pain between a girl’s legs is hers alone. I did not tell Kamal about my abortion because I was angry that I suffered and he did not. I thought, Why does he get away with no worries and I have been worrying every month and now we were unlucky and I have all this danger and trouble alone. I thought, I want to love him and I do not want to marry him. Why was this so? We could not be unlucky again. I wanted to study and to be free. I lived in this jumble of unclear thought. I was invisible at home, a girl whose parents were dishonourable. Outside there were growing demonstrations and rumours of war in Bengal and Uncle was nervous. Two weeks after my abortion, he called me to the sitting room. When Uncle and Aunt wanted to talk to me together, in the same room, it was always unpleasant for me. Uncle said that things were unstable in Afghanistan, that he had heard again from the family there.
Aunt said that Uncle wanted me to go abroad to Canada now, that they were worried about me.
They were secretive and they organized things and told me nothing as if I were only a lapis amulet to be kept or traded for luck. The consulate was in the hotel and it was easy for Uncle to do everything without telling me.
I said, I do not want to study in Canada. I want to study here. Why did you not tell me?
I went to Sister Devan. She said, I knew your mother and father, Mahsa, and they loved you and wanted you to be educated. Do not forget this no matter what happens later.
She had helped Uncle make my application to go abroad. Why was everyone’s idea more important than mine?
Aunt said, We did not want to tell you and upset you, and Uncle said, You will do as we say. All is arranged.
I’m not going, I said. I want to stay here.
I started to cry and Uncle stood and came to me and lifted my chin roughly with his hand which stopped me crying immediately. He said, You are ungrateful. Most girls would consider themselves lucky to have a chance to study abroad. Go now and get ready.
He pressed his thick finger hard into the soft space at the back of the jaw, near my throat, and lifted it until I could feel it stop my breath.
When he left the room I said to Aunt, I don’t want to go.
Each time Uncle forced me to do something, her eyes fell flat until he was out of the room. Then she would try to comfort me. I felt in her a satisfaction that I too had to suffer his brutality. It was easier that I wear the same bit and halter. But she had also watched, famished, as I went to school and she sometimes tried to read my books.
What did you hear from Mor’s brothers?
They are jealous men, she said. They know you are of marriageable age and they know that Uncle has money.
I learned how divisions and rivalries were continuous in our family. Aunt often spoke of them while leafing through her fashion magazines. She did not look at me, as if this made her telling less dangerous. She had told me about the time of Queen Soraya who took off the veil. She would turn another page and say, Sometimes the change appears only on the surface. I shrugged. Mor never wore even a scarf.
Mahsa, Uncle’s mind has been made up for a long time.
She continued in a voice that was not whispering but private, This is a chance for you. I never had a chance to do what you are going to do. The nuns helped find a scholarship for you, Mahsa, that is why Uncle agrees and now also he thinks there may be opportunity in business over there. Go. Things will be free there.
But why did you not tell me?
Uncle said no.
I had no choice. I hated Aunt for her weakness but she had given me an idea about being free in a faraway place.
When I told Kamal, he got up roughly, knocking over the chair in Zelin’s, and everyone looked at us and he threw some rupees on the table and said to me, Let’s go outside.
I want to finish my tea.
So he set his chair upright and sat down again, a bit ashamed and the colour softened in his face and he leaned across the small table toward me and said, Say no to your uncle. Tell him no.
Always I had loved to meet with Kamal wherever he suggested and to share the books he read and to listen to his music and always I had felt less free than he was. An unfamiliar part of me was slowly admitting that I wanted to go, that I did not want to live with Uncle any longer. I too could go into the world, and never had I imagined that I could do it alone. I thought, Perhaps I am like Abbu. He went across the ocean in the opposite direction. Would I look as strange there as the foreigners looked here on hippie buses? But my father was American. Aunt had one picture of McGill on a pamphlet, stone buildings and a stone entranceway and a large grassy area in front of the main buildings. Aunt also had a pamphlet about the city and together we looked at pictures of Saint Joseph’s Oratory and Marie-Reine-du-Monde cathedral by the train station with carvings of holy men across the top and a mountain in the middle of the city with a tall cross lit up at night and people with white teeth wearing fur hats and mittens and ice skates. I said, Does not everyone look happy in Montreal? And Aunt said, Well, maybe they are.
Are there any people from Karachi there?
I do not know. My friend said someone was trying to build a mosque.
Maybe I will be Christian over there then.
Aunt said, Do not talk like that in front of Uncle.
My father was Christian and I have both their names. I will not be Najibullah over there, I will be Weaver. Mor always said that one day I would need both their names.
Your papers that Uncle sent say Najibullah.
Kamal found a friend’s place the afternoon before I left and our lovemaking, the first since my abortion, was slow and silent and tender. That day his eyes were saying, Do not go, this cannot be right, and when we rested after, he was sad instead of raging and he said, We will never find this again.
I could find no words to comfort him and I was going away so we made love again and with my body I could say the true thing, that I loved him. I did not know how to say the complicated thing which was that I did not know who I was and I now had a chance to see and I wanted that too and would he keep loving me and would he wait for me? These are all simple words, short words, but I did not know how to say them to him.
In that sweet moment when I still had my lover, my music, my books, my own city, I was already turning toward things exciting and unknown. I discovered that I was not objecting to this adventure imposed on me. My body was trying to say everything to him, that I loved him, and that I was frightened to leave him. What was I releasing myself from? My Karachi uncle. My Afghan uncles. From worrying about getting pregnant. From dead Mor and Abbu.
Kamal said, I will always love you.
Always we undressed each other and then, after we made love, we quickly pulled on our clothes to leave and go back into the streets of Karachi. That day we lingered and I did not want to leave and it began as a game because I did not want to get out of bed. He teased me and said, Come, my friend will be back and your uncle will be waiting.
He began to dress me in bed, laughing, slipping on my panties first, then my skirt.
I said, My turn. And I found his boxers and trousers and helped him put them on.
He put on my bra and my blouse and buttoned each button slowly, kissing each glimpse of skin before he covered it, and my wrists and forearms and the lovely place inside the elbow, and then he combed my hair, touched my ears with his lips and when he was finished I put aside his T-shirt to keep for myself and I began to slowly put on his shirt and button it from top to bottom moving my lips from his throat toward his navel and I felt him aroused and we made love again, not removing our shirts this time, quickly, like taking a drink of water, coming quickly, and then we dressed ourselves, but with no kisses, and he held me close to him and through his clothes I felt his warmth and he said, Now you are dressed to go away from me. This is a mistake. I should lock you naked in a room. Mahsa, do not forget me.
W
hat at first we are unable to read we must endure later on. That night I looked out the window at the fleet-beauty of moonflowers in their pots and then I lay in bed, falling asleep, my body sated from Kamal, my mind agitated with the thought of flying alone for the first time in an airplane and arriving in a faraway place and not knowing where I would sleep or how I would find things or how would I be in Canada with English and French, with people who did not know me and from this half sleep I sat straight up in bed and thought with panic, I forgot to say goodbye to Abbu.
And then I awoke fully and remembered he was dead.
KATHERINE
When I was big, I sat at the piano before they turned on the stage lights and waited in the dark. People noticed me less. I played and ate and slept like a hibernating bear. I loved the road. I wanted a never-ending tour. But two weeks before the baby was due, Ma called and said, What are you thinking? and she got me worried and I figured I’d better start to get organized. I said to Mo, I gotta take a break from the band. I’m going back to Hamilton to get an apartment and have the baby.
He took a roll of bills out of his pocket and gave me some and said, I thought you were gonna have it right up there on stage.
I asked, Was it you who called Ma?
He answered, Why would I do that?
I could earn more playing piano in a night than Ma made in two days on her feet wiping counters and she was furious. She had kept a roof over my head and made me guilty enough to stay in school and graduate. It was more than anyone did for her. Now, with all this advantage, I was throwing whateverit-was away. I had gone and got knocked up by a Negro, and worse, I was walking around like a cock in a henhouse.
Ma said to me, You should get that look off your face. I had it too.
Ma, I found an apartment down from the Connaught. Come see after work.