Everything Was Good-Bye (14 page)

I tried to picture how my mother’s nights might pass when I was gone and married and she was truly alone. My dadi had once told my mother that a woman without a husband was incomplete, but a woman without a husband and children was not a woman at all—she was simply an ap-parition haunting her own life. At the time she’d said it to comfort my mother—her daughter-in-law—but now it was no comfort at all.

At 5:30 I heard my mother get up. The squeak of her mattress and the patter of footsteps in the kitchen, the running of water for tea and the clearing of pots and pans from the dish rack: I listened to her morning routine, letting an hour pass between us until sleep overtook me.

I dreamed of Harj. I couldn’t see her face—it was indistinct, and warped as if I were looking at her through water—yet I knew it was her. I could tell by the way she moved. Her chin was tilted up, her head held high, her walk as light and quick as a ballerina’s. We were at the beach. Harj had
wandered to the pier where other teenagers were sitting, their legs dangling offthe edge like fishing rods. One by one they took their turns diving into the water below, until only Harj was left sitting there. As she stood up, contemplating the water, I saw her eyes. My eyes. Deep and black, reflecting what was below. Fish swam in and out of her pupils. My pupils. She jumped. I watched the ripples soften and dissolve as I waited for her to resurface, but it was only I who woke up gasping for breath.

Serena was standing over me. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. My throat was too parched to speak. I glanced at the clock radio. It was 10:30.

“You should get up. Aman will be here soon to do your makeup.”

I sat up, running my fingers through my hair. “Makeup?”

“Yeah. You can’t meet Sunny’s family looking like this.”

I didn’t answer.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just not sleeping well.”

“Probably nerves.” She reached across the bed, pulled the blinds up and looked out at the sky. “Well, at least it stopped raining,” she said.

“Serena?”

“Hmm.”

“Do you ever think about Harj?”

She smiled even though her eyes were sad. “All the time,” she said, glancing around the room before leaving. “All the time.”

After showering I went into the kitchen, where my mother and Masi were taste-testing the rice pudding. Masi thrust the wooden spoon in my face. “More sugar?”

I licked the end of the spoon. “It’s fine.”

Masi ran her index finger along the spoon’s edge, testing it again herself.“Needs more,” she said to my mother, who dumped in another half cup.

“What’s all this?” I asked, pointing towards the trays of sweets that were lining the counters. “I thought we agreed that this was just going to
be a get-to-know-you kind of dinner and that we wouldn’t make a big deal about it.”

“We aren’t making it a big deal,” Masi said.

“No? Then what’s this?” I asked, opening the porch door for Aman, who had arrived with her infamous black make-up case. The smell of onions wafted in. I peeked into the yard. Tej was outside in the shed, frying onions on a gas burner.

“We can’t cook onions in the house; it would smell,” Masi said, lighting a stick of dollar-store incense.

“Of course. We wouldn’t want them to know we’re Indian.” I reached for a cup of tea.

Masi nudged me, winking. “Smile, hmm? You’re too pretty to frown so much.”

I grinned a toothy smile and she pinched my cheeks.

Aman dragged one of the kitchen chairs into my room and told me to sit down. She opened her case and pulled out her wares, plugging in a curling iron, laying out small pots of makeup, and various brushes on a white towel. She assessed my complexion while pulling and tweezing stray eyebrow hairs. She heated up wax and stripped the hair from my arms until my skin looked ripe and sunburned.

“Is this really necessary? They’re just coming for dinner.”

She put a cold towel over the raw skin. “Aren’t you even a little excited?”

She ripped another wax strip off.

“Ouch.” I bit my lip. “Only for it to be over.”

“It’s Sunny Gill. How can you be so cavalier about it?” She slathered moisturizer onto my arms until a smooth glow had replaced the redness. My arms felt fuzzy, asleep, as if the skin were floating an inch above where it used to be. She reached onto her tray and grabbed pots of face powder and concealer, blending foundations on a palette, occasionally holding up the brush to my skin to match the tone. “Just think of it. You could be Mrs. Sunny Gill.” She paused as if she were imagining it the way everyone else in the house was. Masi and my mother had been talking about the prospect of it with a controlled enthusiasm that was now bordering on hysteria. My mother had invited all of my sisters, their husbands and children over to
meet Sunny. She thrived in the cooking and chaos of the day, raising and lowering her voice and expressions to meet it. One moment she was frying the pakoras
,
another she was showing Masi all the suits she had bought. Her closet was stuffed with her pre-emptive wedding shopping, an array of suits and saris that she had bought on sale at the local cloth house. The shopkeeper, Gyan, a flat-voiced muppet of a man with a rumpled green turban, had helped us with my sisters’ wedding shopping; he’d been delighted when he saw us walk in, and remarked that it was about time I got married. “Ju are the last vun!” he said, twisting his wrist in the air as if my marriage were a magic trick. As irritated as I’d felt by his stating the obvious, I burst into laughter at the sound of his voice and the recollection of Harj’s many imitations of him—with her chunni piled on her hair like his sloppy turban, she would tilt her head to each side like a see-saw. My laughter collected, cracking the corner of my eyes with small tears. During the drive home, my mother scolded me and told me this was the last time she would ask me to drive her.

Though she’d gotten her driver’s licence soon after my father died, she refused to drive on the highway, saying she could not keep up with the on-ramps, the off-ramps, the multiple lanes and the sheer speed of it all. Once, when we were children, she’d tried to drive us to the Nanak Sar Gurdwara in Vancouver but ended up pulling over on the side of the road in clenched tears. We had to walk along the highway, in our salwar kameezes, our chunnies almost blowing offour heads because of the slicing of cars that raced by us, until we came to a gas station. There we called Mamaji, who came to pick us up. Later my mother remarked how lucky she was that he was never angry, how a husband would have been upset about having to pick us all up, but her brother was always there when she needed him, his mood never adding or taking away anything from hers. He was steady and dependable, the kind of man who didn’t usually smile with his teeth, but when prompted by enough Black Label would grin kind madness. It was he who’d scoured the streets for Harj when she left and he who’d given my sisters away in their marriages, and now it was he who calmed my mother’s nerves about my marriage.

My mother rushed down the hall in a panic, announcing the time like a countdown. “Forty-five minutes, they will be here in forty-five minutes.” She poked her head in my bedroom door. “Meena, why are you not dressed yet? They will be here soon.” She tapped her wrist even though she wasn’t wearing a watch, and continued down the hallway calling out the time for anyone who hadn’t heard.

“Almost done,” Aman said without looking up. “Meena, would you stop fluttering your eyelids; you’re messing up the liner.” She retouched it, then smudged it with the edge of her fingertip and stood back to admire her work. “Close your eyes,” she said, and blasted my hair with a steady shot of hairspray. “That should do it.” She twirled the chair around so I could see myself in the mirror. My sisters and Masi, who had been waiting outside the door, piled in.

“Vah! Vah! Eyes like Hema Malini!” Masi handed me my salwar kameez and they all faced the wall while I suited up. The embroidery clawed at my skin.

“Done,” I said, turning to the mirror. I hardly recognized myself. My fuchsia salwar kameez dotted with gold sequined flowers and emerald stones made me look like a transvestite at Mardi Gras. My hair was a mane of glossy curls, my eyes smouldered in three tons of purple eye shadow and my lips had been plumped up in pink gloss. I looked like I’d been plucked from a 1980s’ Hindi movie.

Masi clapped and held her hands to her heart. “She needs more lip gloss… more hairspray… one more time with the mascara.” After another half-hour of fussing and primping, Aman stood back with her brushes in hand, assessing my angles the way a portrait painter might look at a work in progress.

“Okay, enough. She looks fine,” my mother said, rushing in with a box of pink bracelets.

I tried to slide them on. “They’re too small.” She reached over and collapsed my hand in hers, pushing the bracelets over my knuckles, the force of which pinched my flesh into accordion folds. “It hurts.” I bit my lip as
she tried again. Tears formed. Aman and my sisters stepped back, moving out of my mother’s way.

“Make your hands smaller,” she said. Her eyes narrowed with deter-mination.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

She squeezed my hand so hard that I thought all the bones would break. “Serena, pass me the baby oil.”

She slathered it over my hands, pushing the bangles over my raw knuckles one at a time. “We will make them fit.”

They arrived according to Indian standard time—an hour late—and by then our anxious chatter had turned to silence and channel surfing. My sisters and I were watching a
Seinfeld
rerun when their car pulled up. “It’s a Mercedes,” Aman reported from her position at the window, where she’d stationed herself more than an hour ago. I watched them get out of the car and brace themselves against the cold wind. There was Sunny, his mother and father, Amarjit Auntie and Kal. From my vantage point all I could see were the tops of their heads. Sunny’s father had a bald spot nestled in his salt-and-pepper hair, and I wondered if Sunny would lose his hair too. They all kept their heads down except for Sunny, who looked up and around as if he were lost and orienting himself to his surroundings. I ducked when he glanced up at the window, and then I peered out from the side of the drapes. Aman was right: Sunny was film-star perfection, with a chiselled face and eyes that drew you out and in. A look that was alluring, that made you want sex.

“What are you doing still standing there?” Serena ushered me into my room, reminding me that I wasn’t to be seen until summoned. I heard her quickly raking the shag carpet on our steps and placing the garden rake in the hall closet. No other family but ours raked their shag carpet. My mother thought it looked messy if the pile was not all facing the same way. “First impressions count,” she said.

The tray of teacups rattled in my hands. I didn’t look up even though I was aware that I was being watched and assessed. I put the tray on the table and handed Sunny’s mother a cup, which she accepted with a curt nod. Her hair was cut in a pageboy style and dyed an unfortunate shade of auburn that looked burgundy in certain lights. She had a protruding mole on her cheek, the kind that would eventually sprout hair. Unlike my mother, she wore makeup, gobs of it: a face powder shades lighter than her own skin, maroon lipstick and blotches of blush. She reminded me of another auntie my mother used to work with—one who had worn so much makeup that she’d looked like an Indian drag queen. Harj and I nicknamed her Dame Desi. The recollection made me smile. Kal smiled back. My mother frowned, and I looked down.

As I offered the tea to Sunny, my mother began the introduction, announcing my age and listing my accomplishments. Sunny’s mother eyed me up and down with what I was sure was admiration and disdain. Eye-liner pooled in the corners of her eyes like dark sleep. According to Aman, I was at least the eighth girl Sunny had been shown in the past three months.

“Does she speak Punjabi?” his mother asked.

“Yes, of course,” my mother replied.

“Can she cook?”

“She is learning,” my mother lied. I had never made anything but a cup of chai.

“Educated?”

“She has a degree.”

“Sit down,” she said, patting the empty spot on the sofa between her and Sunny. She put her arm around me, her expensive perfume choking me like her insincere embrace. I didn’t look up. “You know I have no daughters,” she said to my mother. “You are so lucky to have five daughters.” I wanted to correct her and say six daughters, but I knew that Harj was not to be counted—any acknowledgement of her would be an insult to our present good fortune. I wondered how it was that we had gotten used to her absence. How were we able to pretend that she had never even existed. “I always wanted a daughter to shop for,” Sunny’s mother said, taking a sip
of tea. “I telephoned my sister in Bombay and told her to start looking for the latest fashions for when Sunny gets married. Our styles here are a year behind,” she added, eyeing my pink kameez with disapproval.

“Is that where your suit is from?” my mother asked, turning her insult of my attire inside out to compliment her.

“Oh yes, I bought this one on my last trip. I try to go to India once a year. It is so changed since we lived there,” Sunny’s mother said, directing all her comments now to my mother. “It is very progressive. Everyone has a mobile phone, wears Nike and drinks Coca-Cola. It is very Westernized now.”

“I thought you did not like the colonization of India,” her husband commented, momentarily embarrassing her.

“Of course I want to be modern, but I also like to keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India, yes? Just because the British have left does not mean we must remove every trace of them. If we did that we would have no railroads, only rickshaws!”

Everyone nodded and laughed between sips of tea, except her husband, who seemed permanently irritated with his wife: his face was as skewed as her opinions. He was a tall, bony man with slackened skin and wire-rimmed glasses that sat on the edge of his nose. He was her opposite in every way. He hardly spoke. His silence, as I discovered, was not a sign of strength—it was a necessity. There was only so much room for conversation and his wife monopolized it with her Bombay British accent that reminded us she was an educated woman. I wondered if all marriages were like that. Did one partner always defer to the other?