Everything Was Good-Bye (13 page)

I pulled the fax confirmation slip offthe tray and as I turned to leave, Trish walked in, sidling up next to him. “I was just telling Michelle about the swim-up bar at the resort. She’s thinking of planning a trip as well. Meena, have you been?” I shook my head, feeling like an idiot as I ducked out. I hadn’t realized they’d gone to Mexico together.

Liza sat down, holding her questions when she saw me return to my desk a little defeated. I sat in front of my computer, tapping random keys, watching the letters filling a blank Word document. Somehow it made sense.

When I got home, I slipped offmy heels, changed my clothes and fell into a frustrated silence that my mother referred to as moodiness. She
never understood my need for quiet and filled the space with numb details that coloured in all of our lonely parts. As she told me about her workday, I nodded absent-mindedly, listening only to every other word. I wondered what was being harvested but didn’t bother to ask; her withered expression, her stained nail beds and the dirt dotting her tear ducts all cried out that, whatever it was, it was rotten. The fields were being cleared for something new; the seasons had changed, and if not for my mother I might not have noticed.

“I phoned you five times today,” she said, buttering the tender side of the stacked rotis. Though it was only the two of us now, she still made enough food for my sisters. She repeated herself, louder this time, trying to be heard over the hood fan that pulled the singed heat from the tava.

“I know. I got the messages,” I said, looking up from the journal I was attempting to write in. Words were not coming easily. “What was it that you wanted?” I asked.

“The boy, Sundeep,” she began. “He is from a good family… ”

“Mom, not this again.”

“Yes, this again. You will not get a better offer.”

I put my journal down and looked out the window at the tapping of rain and bare-boned trees. “Do we have to talk about this now? I told you I’m not sure.”

“Not sure, you are not sure,” she said, nodding her head. “I was not sure when I married your father and moved to England, had six children and then moved to Canada. I was not sure what I would do when your father died and I had to raise all of you alone. I was not sure while I emptied ashtrays or picked berries twelve hours a day to put you through school. I was not sure how to make a better life for you and now you tell me that
you
are not sure,” she said without taking a breath. “Meena, sometimes in life you must do the things you are unsure of.”

“Mom, I just need some time.”

“Time,” she repeated as if it were a question or a word that she didn’t understand. She wrapped a stack of rotis in tinfoil and ladled daal into a plastic container. “I need you to take these to Serena’s house for me.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. She’s waiting,” my mother said, handing them to me.

Serena lived in Stucco Surrey, where all the boxy houses had red-tiled roofs and lawns that were dotted with the typical Sikh flourish of orange, Khalsa-coloured marigolds that were often crushed by parked cars. Park-ing in the area was a problem. All the houses—or Hinduminiums, as Kal and I called them—had several basement suites and not enough room for their tenants’ cars. To alleviate the problem, a growing number of residents had cut all their trees down, pulled up the grass and landscaped their front yards with asphalt. The combination of shortsighted residential planning and a lack of bylaw enforcement had turned the area into a cement slum which its residents called Chandigarh.

My mother was indignant about the way India was creeping through our suburbs, in the same way that she was about the moss that had over-taken our garden. She did nothing but condemn it with a watchful eye. She stood at the kitchen window watching the house across the street being demolished to make way for a new megahome. Each afternoon, instead of watching
All My Children,
she sat by the window and watched the phases of construction the way I usually watched the changing weather. When I came home from work, she would tell me about the workers who had stripped the house for salvage, the excavator’s tracks that had flattened the roses, the wrecking ball that had hit the house like a fist and the excavator jaws that had snapped everything like bone. Each stage was relived in such detail that it left me splintered and torn. I didn’t understand why my mother was so bothered by it all until we met the owner’s wife. She’d come running into our front yard chasing after her barefoot children, who routinely zipped across the road with little care or attention. She apologized to my mother, referring to her as “Auntie.” My mother was polite about it, explaining that she had several grandchildren and understood. The woman wrangled her toddlers, hoisting the little boy onto her hip and yanking the girl to her side every time she dared to stray. She smiled the kind of wide smile that masks all other emotions. A toothy muzzle. She asked my mother the usual sort of questions—how long we had lived here,
where we were from, how many children we were, how many were married. My mother was matter of fact about it, offering only a few details, already aware that she was being judged. The woman, who was only a few years older than me, looked my way and asked my mother why I was not married. To my surprise my mother did not commiserate with her and told her that I had just finished university and that in Canada a woman’s education was more important than her marriage. “How modern,” the woman said, glancing at my jeans and T-shirt. She simmered, grinning before calling to her daughter, who had run into the street again.

Her smile was as good as a slap.

Serena was in the kitchen, standing at the stove, looking slightly di-shevelled in her stockinged feet and navy-blue airport uniform. She smiled my way, distracted by the ringing phone and by my niece, who was crawl-ing at her feet, tugging on the hem of her skirt and pulling at the run in her nylons. I picked Simran up, playing peekaboo while Serena answered the phone and abruptly told a telemarketer that she wasn’t interested. “They always call at the worst time,” she said, hanging the phone back in its wall cradle before reaching for Simran, who was jettisoning herself into the air towards Serena.

“How was work?” I asked. “Anything interesting?”

“Nothing…
except
there was this one Indian guy who’d tried to hide his stash of cocaine in his underpants.”

“Did you have to get it?” I teased.

“Vaheguru!” she said, snapping me with a dish towel.

Serena had always wanted to be a flight attendant, but Dev didn’t like the idea of her travelling, or of his caring for the children in her absence, so she’d settled for swatting the security paddle across limbs for eight hours a day over the past ten years. She still had the framed map of the world that she’d bought after high school, but instead of being dotted with pinpricks denoting her travels, it reflected the destinations of all those who had gone through the security gates on her shift.

“Do you want tea?” She was rummaging through the kitchen cupboard, looking for Simran’s baby cookies. The kitchen was as it always was: dishes stacked haphazardly in the sink, last night’s pizza boxes on the counter, plastic toys and Tupperware scattered on the floor.

I rolled up my sleeves and started into the dishes.

“Did you bring the roti?” Serena asked.

I pointed to the bag on the counter. Serena placed her daughter in the nearby high chair with a cookie and opened the bag, pulling out the stack of rotis and the assorted tins of daal and subzi that my mother had packed. She moved robotically, each joint and bone protruding in purpose. Her eyes were socketed in deep circles that made her look old and frail. She had once been beautiful.

“So how are things?” she asked, transferring the contents of each tin into a microwaveable bowl.

“Things?”

“You know, at home. Mom says you still haven’t decided about Sunny.”

“She’s right. I haven’t.”

“What’s there to decide? He’s said yes, his family is loaded, he’s good-looking, got a great career. What more do you want?”

“Love would be nice,” I said sarcastically, tired that the prospect of Sunny always seemed to garner as much excitement as a celestial event or a religious festival. I rinsed the dishes and turned offthe water. The steam rose and fogged up the window.

“Look, love will come later,” Serena said. “At least you get to meet Sunny. I didn’t get to speak to Dev until our wedding night. All I had to make my decision on was a picture and Masi’s recommendation.”

I turned towards her. “I don’t know how you did it.”

“I just did what I had to do,” she answered. “And love… well, like I said, it came later.” She gestured to a picture of their eldest son. “You’ll see, it will be the same for you too.” She said it with an assuredness that bothered me. I didn’t want it to be the same for me. I had never wanted anything to be the same for me, but could never clarify how I wanted it to be different either.

I turned the water back on and rinsed the sink. “What if I don’t like him?”

“Well, you won’t know until you meet him,” she said, putting her arm around me.

“I suppose.” I whispered it, practising submission. “But really, what if I
don’t
like him—do I get to say no?”

Serena turned around, busying herself with the tea. “Do you want sugar?”

“Mom’s already arranged for them to come over, hasn’t she?” I stared straight ahead into the window, unable to see my reflection through the steam, and for a moment it felt as if I’d disappeared.

“Yeah… This Sunday—she was going to tell you, but… ”

“But—she asked you to do it.”

“She thought it would be easier.” Serena quieted when her husband came into the room whistling a Hindi tune. He dropped his lunchbox on the counter and asked about dinner.

While Serena finished warming her husband’s food, I bathed Simran and helped my nephews A.J. and Akash with their homework. I could hear her in the other room talking with Dev—or rather taking orders from him, refilling his plate, getting him another beer, passing him the remote control. Things she did as easily as breathing. Sometimes I wondered how she even understood anything he said—his speech was so foreign, his village accent so heavy that I had to strain to get the meaning. He had a way of stammering and snapping, the urgent rhythms out of tune with the con-text of whatever he was saying. His words were like whips. Harj had hated it too. In fact she had hated him and went to great lengths to show it. She was like that; either she liked you or she didn’t and when she didn’t all she could think of was how much. My mother had often said she was focused to the point of being narrow-minded and stubborn. Once Harj made a list of all the things she hated about Dev. She hated that he wore sneakers with dress pants, that he wore Old Spice, that he had dandruff, that he wore polyester shirts with pit stains, that his belly looked man-pregnant, that he
leered at women, that he picked his nose and flicked it, that he’d tried to grab her ass. The list went on. When Serena found it, she slapped Harj and ripped the piece of paper to shreds. Harj didn’t flinch, she didn’t move. It made me wonder if she was brave or just plain mean.

When Serena had finished serving Dev dinner, she came into the room, loosening the red scarf around her neck, undoing a button on her skirt, exhaling as if this were the first breath she had taken all day. As she sat on the carpet next to me, building a tower of blocks that Simran repeatedly knocked down, she was quiet with fatigue and contemplation. “It’s not so bad, you know… being married… He’s not so bad, not like you think.” Her words caught, hinging on the silence that followed. Before I could concede defeat, she turned the other way. Both of us exposed.

2.3

I
watched the light shift from blue to silver, the sunrise washed out by the layers of grey that stretched and collapsed all the days into one. Dark receded to the corners of my room. I hadn’t been sleeping well since I’d found out about the upcoming meeting with Sunny. Each night I tossed and turned with the wind, measured my thoughts with the gusts of rain that rattled the windows, and tried to sleep between storms. But even then, nothing. Nothing but the sound of the neighbours’ mournful wind chimes and the sound of my mother’s sleeplessness. She shuffled around, wandering from room to room, switching on and offlights, locking and unlocking doors. Sometimes I saw her cross the backyard in her shabby housecoat, a shadow among shadows, picking up strewn branches, garbage cans and pieces of newspaper that had been set tumbling through the night. When she returned to her bed, I’d hear her trying for warmth, the sound of her feet scratching against each other like the rustling of autumn leaves. Eventually she would settle and the only sound in the house would be the howl of the wind, the hum of the furnace, the holding of breath.

When I was a girl, I’d crawl into her bed and warm my cold feet against her calves and she’d push me away, telling me to go back to bed, even though I knew she wanted me to stay. Her breath was always heavy and dense with the smell of cloves. It enveloped me and I’d lie awake remembering the stories she had told me when I was frightened by a thunder
storm. “Ik si chidi ik si kaa… .” Once there was a bird, once there was a crow… . I didn’t understand the rest, but I liked the sound of all her stories. Sometimes I would stop her midway through and translate for myself. She didn’t seem to mind, back then, that we didn’t understand each other, and she allowed me my own interpretations—unlike her versions, they ended with everyone living happily ever after. Once she’d fallen asleep, I’d lie on my side staring at the luminous hands of the clock that she and my father had brought from England. I’d reach out and wind the clock, turning the key round and round, hoping that I could make morning come faster. But it didn’t and one day when the clock finally stopped, I worried that it was my fault. I thought I had made time stop.

If only.

Those two words have gathered like ghosts. If only my father hadn’t died, if only my mother had had sons, if only Harj had stayed, if only I hadn’t met Liam, if only he could have loved me… Once when I was la-menting Harj’s departure, my mother told me that “If only” was the beginning of new dreams made of old things and that only God could reincar-nate our hopes into such a reality.