Everything Was Good-Bye (11 page)

“Stick to your own kind.”

Liam ran back down the stairs, taking two at a time. “Let’s get out of here.”

We drove to my house in silence. It wasn’t the comfortable silence I was used to; it was a quiet of good-byes, a measure of distance.

“What your dad said.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“I know, but… ”

“But what, Meena?”

“I don’t know.”

Liam pulled the car over and took the keys out of the ignition. He rested his head against the window. “Look, I never meant for this to happen.”

“For what to happen?”

“Meena, I like you. I like you a lot and I j-just… ”

“You just… ?” He didn’t answer. I waited for a minute, but he didn’t try to speak. “Forget it. Don’t worry about it.” I reached into my bag and handed him the roll of film I’d taken.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s nothing.” I got out of the car and walked down the street, looking back only when I heard him drive away.

When I opened the back door I could tell that my mother had been cooking. The pungent aroma of onions, butter and masala filled the stairwell and clung to my skin.

“You are in so much trouble,” Tej said, passing me in the hall on her way to bed.

“Thanks, like I didn’t know,” I replied. In truth I was almost grateful that my mother was home, that she was angry, that I would be punished. I wanted a reason to not think of Liam.

I stood in the kitchen doorway. My mother was mixing her tarka with a wooden spoon stained in turmeric. Steam rose up into her face, fogging up her bifocals, as the onions sizzled in the melting butter. She looked up long enough for her glasses to clear and saw me standing there. She quickly turned her attention back to the contents of the steel pot.

“You’re here?” she asked, stirring harder. “Why come home now? Just stay out.”

“Mom, I just… ”

“Just what?” She looked up in disgust. Although her glasses were foggy, I could see her exaggerated stare in the magnified portion of the lens and I wondered if she knew. She must have. “Speak in Punjabi!” she said, slamming her hand on the counter. She took her glasses off, wiped her face with the back of her hand and squinted at me with her near-sighted eyes. I wondered if she could even see me.

“No more going out. No staying at school late, no friends. No more… you understand?”

I nodded.

“You’ll go to school and come home… understand?” She put her glasses back on and added pepper to the curry mixture.

My eyes began to water. “It’s the onions,” I told her.

She leaned over the sink and opened the window.

TWO FOR SORROW

2.1

H
old still.” Masi tugged at the drawstring of my petticoat “Do you have to tie it so tight?” I sucked in my stomach to accommodate the knotty fingers that nipped at my waist.

She took the safety pin from her mouth and pricked it through the layers of silk. “If I don’t, it will fall at your feet before the bride even gets to the reception.”

I pulled at the sari blouse while she adjusted the pleats of my blue cocoon. “Couldn’t you have made the blouse a little longer?” I pleaded, covering my exposed stomach.

Masi smacked my hand away and then tempered her reaction with a wink. “This is a sari, not a burka
.
Its seduction is in what it hides and what it hints at.” She stood back and smiled, clapping once before placing her hands on her round hips. “If I had your figure, I would wear a sari every day.”

“You could still wear one.”

Masi covered her mouth with her chunni. “Oh no, I couldn’t. Even six yards is not enough to wrap around my body,” she said, patting her stomach. “You look just like your mother did when she was your age. Isn’t that right, pehenji?”

My mother looked up from the chunni she was hemming, and then down again. “No, I was much thinner.”

Masi frowned and swatted the air. “Don’t listen to her. You are beautiful.”

I’d seen pictures of my mother in her sari soon after she’d married my father. She looked like a Bollywood actress from the 1960s, with kohl-etched cat eyes and pomegranate lips.

Masi straightened the end of the sari over my shoulder and asked me to take a few steps so she could see the sweep of the garment. I walked the length of the hallway and back, minding the size of my steps. Most girls tromped about in their saris as if they were wearing jeans. Their movements fought against the delicate wrap they were confined in, but I was used to being bound by things and knew how to move despite the con-straint of the coiled fabric. “I don’t see why I have to get all dressed up. I’m not the one getting married. In fact, I don’t know why I even have to go at all. We barely know the girl.”

My mother put her needle and thread down. “It’s Mandip’s cousin. It doesn’t look good on Tej if we don’t go.”

“She went to sfu, didn’t she?” Masi asked as she draped and pinned the embroidered fabric over my shoulder.

“Who?” I flinched from the pin.

“Mandip’s cousin, Priya.”

“Only for a bit; she transferred to ubc.”

“She is a doctor,” my mother said, raising her eyebrows above her bifocals.

“No, it’s not the same thing,” I said.

“And the boy… ” Masi added. “He’s from a good family and is an accountant.”

“Embarrassing—she is telling me about embarrassing.”

Though I’d given up my hopes of becoming a writer and gotten an entry-level communications job, my mother would still have preferred that I’d become a doctor or a lawyer. Those professions had the best bragging rights. “An English major and a job in cummoon-ick-cachuns… how do I explain that? People will think that you talk too much and no one will want to marry you.”

“That’s fine by me.”

“Vaheguru Satnam. Meena, don’t say such things. It is bad luck. Of course you want to get married. God willing, you will have a nice match like this boy Priya is marrying—what’s his name?” My mother’s eyes crossed as she attempted to rethread her needle.

“Jag.”

“He’s a friend of Kal’s, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, they went to ubc together.”

“Jagtar and Priya. Same caste, good jobs, such a nice match. I hear Nindra Bhullar arranged it.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it arranged, Mom.”

Everyone at school knew they had spent their tutorials screwing in his Corvette. She was temple trash; she knew her prayers and mouthed them on her knees. While I spent my university years studying, she came to school plain-faced and in modest clothing, then went to the washroom to put on her red lips, black push-up bra, white baby tee and hip-hop hoop earrings. I had never seen a book in her bag.

“Yes, Kishor Auntie told me they found each other themselves,” my mother said. She put her sewing aside momentarily. “Times have changed and however the match was made, at least it is a suitable one.” She picked up her stitch again, pulling the needle in and out. “You are too picky. Every boy that I have suggested, you have turned down, and soon they will stop considering you.”

“One can only hope.” I said it just loud enough for her to hear. “See how she is,” my mother said to Masi. “What am I to do?”

Masi paused, her silence pleading and placating. “Meena, you are twenty-four… It is time for you to get married. When I was twenty-five I had three children.”

“Times have changed,” I said, mimicking my mother’s accent.

Masi smacked me playfully. “Tell me again, what was wrong with that nice boy, Harvinder?” she asked.

“Where to begin… he was less than five feet tall and could barely see over the dash of his suv,” I said, counting his offences on my fingers. “He didn’t have a job, wanted to live in his parents’ house forever—oh, and on top of
that
, he had a girlfriend.”

“Kishor Auntie tells me he got married to a girl from India last month.” “See, this is the problem—the girls here are so picky that the boys have to go to India to find a bride. And what about Baljit? What was wrong with him?” my mother asked.

“The cricket player from India?” She nodded and resumed her hand stitching. “He didn’t even speak English.”

“English is not the language of love.” Masi winked at me. “No, but neither is cricket,” I added, winking back.

“
See?
See how picky she is?” My mother slapped her forehead in frustration.

“There’s nothing wrong with having standards, Mother.”

“You spend so much time writing in your silly books that you have forgotten who you are, Meena. That is the problem.”

“Heh?”

I reached for my necklace. My father had bought it for my mother the day I was born. She’d been sobbing in her hospital bed, cradling her disappointment, apologizing for having given him yet another daughter. He told her to stop crying and presented her with the necklace. Everyone was shocked that a man would buy a woman such a gift after she’d borne him a sixth daughter. The necklace was meant to be a reminder of our value. When he died the necklace was put away, to be worn only when one of us was of marrying age. Our value unassigned until someone chose us as a wife. My mother’s value determined by our choosing.

Masi pushed my hair over my shoulder and fastened the necklace clasp. “Are there any boys from school you like? I could have someone inquire.”

I thought of Liam. I hadn’t seen him since the after-grad party at the beach house. He’d been standing in the corner of the living room, boxed into a drunken conversation with girls who when sober would forget his name. He was smoking, even though he didn’t smoke, nodding his head and tapping ashes onto the carpet. He was talking to some blonde girl, but staring at me. He put out his cigarette, wove across the room, took my hand and led me outside to the front porch. He held me by the back of my neck and kissed me long and hard, until my mouth parted and I kissed him back. He asked me to run away with him. “We could go to Toronto. You could go to school there, use that writing scholarship, and I’d get a job or something. We could make it work.” I told him I couldn’t go with him. He said he’d wait.

“So, is there anyone?” Masi asked again. This time her voice was raised, almost hopeful.

“No. No one in particular.”

“No matter,” she said, adjusting the sari’s embroidered border as if it were a ribbon on a gift. “There is still Kal’s cousin Sundeep Gill. Kishor Auntie tells me that his mother was asking Kal’s mother about you again. There is still hope.”

“Lucky me.”

“Yes, lucky you! What a prospect—you know people say he’s as tall as Amitahb Bachchan, with a face like a young Shashi Kapoor.”

“Yeah, but he acts more like Salman Khan.” I’d heard girls at school talk of Sunny Gill. Like a Bollywood bad boy, he was on their lists of eligible but likely unattainable husbands. Troubled by alcohol and fuelled by privil-ege, he had a life of excess—high-speed car wrecks and ruined love affairs. His last girlfriend had tried to kill herself after he broke up with her; his parents didn’t approve of his marrying out of caste. When I’d heard about it, I wasn’t sure which of them to feel sorry for.

“Yes, I heard he is a little wild, but boys will be boys until marriage makes them men.”

“Well, I don’t think he wants to get married anyways.”

“What does
want
have to do with it? He must do what he is told. We all must do as we are told,” Masi said, her eyes close to mine as she placed a bindi on my forehead. She reached for the crumpled shoebox on the table and handed me the gold sandals that she’d brought from India. They were made of wood and covered in glitter glue. I sounded like a horse when I walked in them, clopping about in sparkles. I knelt down, ratcheted the straps around my ankles and stood up, teetering. I glanced in the mirror and wondered what Liam would think of me now. That was how I thought of him, not as a person but as a reference point, a marker, a compass. If only he had waited. By the time I’d returned to the beach he was gone and the house stood abandoned, with only small traces of his leaving left inside. A few months later he’d sent me a letter. No return address. Just the picture that he had taken of me taking his picture. His reflection was caught in the mirror behind me and the flash washed us in light. Each day since Liam had sent me that picture I’d wanted to throw it away, yet I kept it folded inside my journal, its edges worn, its image fading into the creases.

“What do you think?” Masi asked, twirling me towards my mother, who offered a dismissive nod as she reached for the ringing telephone. She hesitated for a full second before saying hello, bracing for whatever news was on the other side. When her expression and manner lightened, I could tell it was Kal on the other end. He was the only one of my friends she liked. “Why can’t you speak Punjabi like Kal?” she’d say. “Why don’t you take me shopping like Kal takes his mother?” She saw me waiting and shooed me away, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece. “Five minutes.” I nodded and went to my room to finish getting ready, listening to the sound of their ritual conversation through the walls.

We had known his family since I was five. Our mothers had worked together, cleaning medical offices. Kal would go along with his mother, Amarjit Auntie, because she didn’t have anyone to watch him, and I went with my mother because I begged her to take me. I wanted to be with her and she agreed as long as I promised to stay out of her way. While our mothers scrubbed sinks, emptied ashtrays and mopped the floors with bleach, Kal and I played jacks and marbles in the 1970s’ orange-and-brown waiting rooms. Amarjit Auntie would occasionally break from her work to
play a round of jacks, muss his silky brown hair and offer us lemon-drop candies from her purse. She didn’t even warn us to keep our sticky hands to ourselves. I told Kal that he was lucky to have such a nice mother. He replied that she was not his real mother—he was adopted. I thought it strange that his mother, who was not his own, loved him like her own while mine, who
was
my own, didn’t know how to love me at all. I wished I’d been adopted. At least then I could say I didn’t belong to anyone.

The best part of going to work with our mothers was the elevator ride into the building’s belly, where garbage was devoured by metal bins. Kal and I always raced to the elevator, because whoever got there first would get to press the buttons. I would usually win, but on that day Kal took a head start and I rushed after him yelling “Cheater cheater, pumpkin eater.” The elevator doors were open and we raced straight in. Before I could tell him to stop, he’d pressed a button and the doors had shut the two of us in. I arbitrarily pounded on the buttons, trying to make the doors open, and began to cry when I felt the jolt of descent. Kal put his sticky lemon-drop hand in mine and told me not to cry, which only made me cry harder. He squeezed my hand and kissed me just as the elevator doors opened. His mother laughed at the innocent sight, but my mother scolded me for my part in it. I stepped out and looked back at the empty elevator. That was the moment when I knew I liked boys and hated small spaces.