Everything Was Good-Bye (3 page)

I walked up the stairs, avoiding the creaky third step, and slipped into the kitchen unnoticed. There I sat at the table, staring at the faded green butterfly wallpaper, counting wings. When my mother called for me, I lowered my head and walked into the room with a tray of water glasses, which I set on the table. My mother cleared her throat, looked at the tray and back at me. I picked it up, offering water to the men first, then to the young woman wearing wedding bracelets and lastly to the elderly woman, the matriarch whose loose caramel skin hung from her jaw. She refused and I set the tray down, waiting to be excused. Harj used to bring the tray in after she’d spat into each glass. But now that she was gone it was my job to offer the water and though I thought of her brazen act each time, I could never repeat it.

“This is the baby?” the elderly woman asked my mother, without taking her coal eyes offme.

“Yes, this is the youngest, Meninder.” My mother gestured towards me in a way that made me feel like I was a parting gift in a game show, something off
The
Price is Right.
“She’ll be eighteen soon.”

The woman feigned a sympathetic smile as I joined my hands in greeting to the group. “Sat Sri Akal.” I offered her an obligatory half-hug. Just like my dadi, she reeked of mustard oil and mothballs.

“You wouldn’t even remember your father, would you?” the woman asked.

I shook my head, pretending that it was some kind of compliment. She inspected me for a moment, pushing my cheeks from side to side, tilting my chin up and down, before touching my head in blessing. I stood there long after she’d sat down, waiting to be excused.

My mother sat on the sofa, head tilted, eyes weepy and withdrawn. I wondered if she were acting or if her grief after so many years could be this real. I’d never seen her cry without an audience; her tears were of little use when there was so much to be done, so many to care for. She never even mentioned my father other than to say how different our lives were when he was alive, how different it would have been had he not died. I always waited on the edge of those sentences, hoping for more. But my mother never spoke of what preceded his absence and I was too frightened to ask. Until I’d discovered it for myself, I didn’t even know his name.

After learning to read, I’d returned to the closet and found, typeset on a half-empty container of penicillin: “Akal.” Years later, while reciting the morning prayer in Punjabi school, I paused on his name:

Ik Onkar

Satnam

Karta purukh

Nirbhau

Nirvair

Akal moorat

Ajuni saibhang.

Gurparshad

Jap.

That was the only prayer I learned, and I repeated it several times before asking my Punjabi teacher what “Akal” meant. She told me that it meant “not subject to time or death.”

I whispered it sometimes—at night as I fell into the quiet possibility of dreams, and even at times like these when I needed something to mute the staid condolences that made loss less than what it was.

“So unfair… such a tragedy… he was so young, such a good man… ” As always, my mother’s face fell, the distance of events blurring behind warm eyes. Her voice cracked, her tone dropping into soft gulps of lapsed grief. “They said it was an accident…there was an investigation…they were sorry…some of them even said it was his fault, but I know he was careful.” She spoke of it in fragments, allowing everyone else to complete her sentences with sympathy.

My father had fallen from the twentieth floor of a luxury high-rise apartment building where he’d been framing the walls. He was proud of his work and boasted about the complex’s amenities: air-conditioned units, an in-ground pool, a private park. It seems strange to me that this building existed somewhere outside our mention of it. That somewhere people were living in these air-conditioned units, pushing their blond, blue-eyed babies in strollers along the very sidewalk where my father lay dead; he’d died instantly. Sometimes I dreamed I was him. Sometimes I dreamed I was the fall. Either way I woke with a screamless breath escaping, my gut twitching into knots. I would lie back loosening them with thoughts of something, and then nothing.

But no matter how many times I dreamed of his death, I could not conceive of it; he was a myth and my mother was a martyr.

“If only he had a son… what can we do… it is kismet.”

I listened to them explain our entire lives away with one word. Apparently, it was my mother’s fate to be a widow with six daughters and our fate to become casualties of fractured lives. Though I struggled against such a predetermined existence, I knew that my sisters and I were all carved out of this same misery, existing only for others, like forgotten monuments that had been erected to commemorate events that had come and gone.

“No one knows why these things happen. Only God knows.
S
atnam Vaheguruji,” said the matriarch. She joined her hands in prayer towards the lithograph of Guru Nanak that hung above the brick fireplace, before falling silent, nodding to the beat of the grandfather clock that clicked like
a metronome. Serena had given it to my mother for her birthday several years ago and since it was too large and cumbersome to fit in the hallway, it was left standing in the living room like a watchman. At the end of each month the pendulum stopped and the clock fell silent until it was wound again—a small reprieve.

Twisting a handkerchief in her fingers, my mother echoed prayer in whispers. I half expected an origami animal to appear out of the cloth. But all that appeared was a distant look on her face that dissolved only when her chunni slipped offher head. She quickly readjusted the fabric and wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Meena will get the chai.” She hurried after me into the kitchen.

“Use the good dishes—the cottage rose china,” she whispered, and ushered Tej in the direction of the silver tray, reminding her not to forget the coasters. “Make sure you let the tea boil after you add the milk,” she instructed, as though we’d never made chai before. But the chai had to be perfect. Something had to be.

My mother returned to our guests composed: the perfect widow in perpetual mourning. I listened to the guests’ dutiful sighs, knowing that they would go back to their homes full of sons thinking
Better her than us
, and congratulate themselves on their happy lives. After they left, others would take their place. It was a modern version of sati; instead of being burned on her husband’s funeral pyre, my mother was repeatedly singed by their reminders, cremating her life inside herself.

1.2

T
he furnace hummed over the sounds of the house settling. I pulled the blinds up. The sun was absent; the sky, a morose canvas of smudged graphite and charcoal. Streams of water trickled down the glass, puddling along the windowsill before settling into the veins of cracked paint. I wrote my name in the condensation and after a moment wiped it away.

I didn’t mind walking to school in weather like this. I hated carrying umbrellas or wearing hats, and submitted to the steady stream of rain. I pulled my Walkman from my coat pocket, put the headphones on and trudged through the puddles and potholes, water seeping into the cracked soles of my shoes. I was listening to Joy Division’s
Unknown Pleasures.
Harj had said that they were the pioneers of post-punk. She said it was real music, not like the superficial sound bites from rappers that were all mc or dj somebody.

By the time I arrived at school I was soaked and my hair fell in dripping black waves around my face. As I walked down the hallway towards my locker, my shoes squeaking against the shiny linoleum floors, the janitor shot me a disapproving look. I curled my shoulders into my chest, shiv-ering a passive apology.

I dropped my bag into my locker, shook my hair and combed out the knots with my fingers. Warm, dry white kids, driven to school by their parents, paraded past. Girls with syrupy laughs recounted their weekends
in giggles that dropped into accusatory laughter when they saw me watching them.

“What are you looking at?”

I clamped my jaw and turned away, pretending I hadn’t heard.

Harpreet was walking down the hall towards me, spinning a basketball on his finger, performing for the popular girls who had only noticed him since he’d stopped wearing a turban and become the captain of the basketball team. He seemed to have forgotten that the kids who befriended him now were the same ones who had taunted him in elementary school— “Paki! Hindu! Turban twister!” Harpreet had been new back then, and didn’t speak English; he smiled at their insults. He didn’t know enough to be angry, but I did. I’d witnessed my mother’s anger when cars squealed by our house as voices yelled “Paki, go home!” and eggs hit our windows.

One night when my mother’s brother, Mamaji, was visiting, it wasn’t eggs. The window exploded and a firecracker rolled towards me through shards of broken glass. I sat stunned; it looked like a sparkler. Mamaji leaped forward, picked it up and hurled it back out the window. It howled down the street, nipping at the heels of dark figures. Mamaji called to my mother to get the baseball bat that sat by the front door, and together they ran into the night. I wanted to watch from the window but Serena shut the drapes. She tucked us into our mother’s bed, assuring us that nothing had ever been thrown through that window. When they came back later that night, Mamaji was asking my mother why she hadn’t taught the sala kutta gora a lesson when she had the chance. My mother told him that she had taught the boys a lesson, one in compassion. When a dozen eggs hit the window the next night, I knew she wished she’d taught them a lesson in retribution.

Once I’d tried to protect Harpreet from the kids and yelled at them to leave him alone. Two of them cornered me and pushed me down onto the gravel field. I picked up a handful of rocks and stood up slowly, my knees raw. I threw the stones at them until they ran away. When I asked Harpreet if he was all right, he kicked me in the shin.

I waved across the hall to Carrie. She was with Todd. He was good-looking in a
Miami Vice
kind of way. Carrie was wearing leggings and a miniskirt; several hoops looped their way up her ears, which, I’d told her, was the exact look I would have worn were I allowed to get my ears pierced more than once. We had been best friends in junior high school, but she’d since traded me for the fame that came with being runner-up in the Miss Teen Canada pageant. I envied her popularity and adopted a new group of friends to replace her: the Smart Ethnics. They weren’t fobs, or fresh offthe boat, as we referred to the immigrants who smelled like onions and had body odour that was thicker than their accents. Nor were they dips—the Dumb Indian Punjabs who clustered together like jalebies, driving around after school in their Firebird Trans Ams. They were the ethnics who took all the advanced classes in algebra, thinking this would somehow help them in life just like the French-immersion kids thought that their piss-poor French would land them dream jobs.

My locker was next to my least favourite Smart Ethnic, Tina, with her incessant cheeriness and bullshit stories. In pe she had brought in an autographed picture of Arthur Ashe; her dad had played tennis with him. In history she brought in pictures of Idi Amin, who had been their neighbour in Uganda, and in law she did a presentation on Clifford Olson, a family friend before he was a serial killer.

“Hi, Meena,” Tina said, putting her pink lipstick on. She smacked her lips together and smiled at herself in the tiny locker mirror. She always wore blue eyeshadow and frosted Revlon lipstick caked over her chapped lips. By the end of the day the lipstick would have settled into cracks and adhered to flakes of dry skin, her mouth a pout of pink scales that she would pick at when she thought no one was looking. She pulled at her leopard-print leggings and adjusted her leather anti-apartheid medallion, which hung between her ample breasts in a display of social outrage despite her name-brand Ralph Lauren shirt. I wondered who she thought she was kidding. This display of ethnicity was all purchased from the Afri-can store in the mall where everything was made in Hong Kong. There was nothing authentic about her. She was part melting pot, part multicultural and part privileged, the kind of person who would get exactly what she
wanted from life with very little effort, not realizing that for the rest of us, life was not that easy.

“Hey,” I mumbled back, wishing that she would stop being so nice to me so I wouldn’t feel so bad about hating her. I slammed the locker door without looking at her. “See you in class.”

I sat in the middle of the classroom, not close enough to the front to be seen as eager but not far back enough to be a slacker. As the other students took their seats, conversations shifted into whispers and note-passing. I wondered what the notes said and wished that one would come my way. Carrie and I used to pass notes, and when we weren’t in class together we would write long letters to each other. Her writing was always entertain-ing, full of inside jokes that made me laugh out loud until I saw that everyone was looking at me wondering what was so funny. The teacher would then say, “Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?” To which I would reply, “No,” and slip the note in my textbook until she wasn’t looking.

I kept all the notes and letters that Carrie had ever written to me. I reread them last summer, embarrassed that I’d preserved the details of junior high school crushes in folded sheets of loose-leaf paper. I worried that someone would find them, and burned them all except for the one that said: “James totally wants to jump your bones. He’s invited us over after school.” I didn’t want to forget that someone had wanted me; I wasn’t the type of girl that boys were interested in. I wasn’t unattractive, but I wasn’t beautiful like the white girls whose hair smelled like green apples. I had features that on their own were not pretty: my lips were thin, my nose was long and my wide brown eyes belonged on a fawn. I was the “could be” pretty girl; with some makeup and a great haircut, one day I
could
be pretty.