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Authors: Gurjinder Basran

Everything Was Good-Bye (8 page)

BOOK: Everything Was Good-Bye
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“What will you do?” Tej asked. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Perhaps admitting it out loud frightened her, because for the rest of the visit she stared out the dirt-streaked window without saying a word. When we came home, my mother called us into the kitchen where she was making roti
.
I couldn’t tell if she was angry or if the dry heat offthe cast iron tava had simply settled onto her cheeks. “Goapy Auntie called. She said she saw you in the city today.”

“She’s wrong.” I glanced at Tej. “I was at school and Tej was… ” Before I could finish my sentence my mother lifted her hands from the tava and hit me. “Liar!” I fell back and reached for the counter to steady myself, but only managed to grab hold of the stack of plates piled on it, pulling them down with me.

My mother turned the stove offand walked to her room, where she stayed barricaded for the next two weeks. She ignored our knocks, our pleas at the door, our tear-soaked apologies. The only person she would speak to was her brother. Mamaji came by once a day, and each time he emerged from her bedside I looked into the room to see my mother lying in the near-dark, discarded tissues piled on the nightstand next to empty teacups. Once she saw me peeking in, and told me in a small voice to come inside. I hesitated, my steps short and heavy, approaching with the trepida-tion of a child looking upon the old and infirm. I sat on the edge of her bed, saying nothing as I listened to her breath fall into a sedated sleep— slow and rhythmic, perfectly prescribed. As I rose to leave, she startled and clasped my hand, looking at me as if I were a stranger, the edges of her reality softening into the mercies of sleep. I sat in the dark watching the little light there was play on her face like a language of dreams. I lay next to her and slept there for the next year.

Occasionally Harj sent me a card. Any time one arrived, my mother stared at it for a long time before asking me to read it to her, and then was disappointed that all it ever said was: “Missing you. xoxo Harj.” Sometimes my mother would buy a box of ladoos and send it to the return address. I told her that Canada Post would not deliver ladoos to a po box, but
she insisted on sending them. They were Harj’s favourite. My mother was always saddened when the crumpled box of sweets was returned stamped “Address Unknown.” She took the contents—broken bits, sugary yellow crumbs—and scattered them on the front lawn. “For the crows,” she’d say.

I stopped in front of our home, looked around, and through the front window of the house across the street saw an auntie standing in her living room. I wondered if she was clocking me or whether she was wondering, as was I, why there were so many cars in our driveway. I rushed inside to find out. The house smelled like an Indian sweet shop; the intense aroma of ghee filled the spaces between chatter and smiling voices. I hadn’t heard such bright voices since Harj had left.

“What’s going on?” I asked Serena, who was standing in the kitchen with Masi. Masi smiled and took offher glasses. She handed me a large, folded aerogram. I opened the knifed edge and pulled out a 4x6 studio portrait of a young Indian man. The constipated expression on his face belied the seemingly thoughtful posture he had assumed, with his arms folded across his chest. The edges of the photo were softened and air-brushed, not at all like the edgy and candid portraits Liam liked to take.

“He is handsome, isn’t he!” she said, clapping her hands.

“Yeah, I guess—who is he?”

She grabbed my shoulder, shaking and hugging me with a force that was greater than her five-foot frame. “This is Kishor Auntie’s nephew. He is here from England looking for a bride.”

“Kishor Auntie?” I had always thought it strange to call every Indian woman, related or not, “Auntie.” Harj had told me that she thought giving strangers titles was a way to rebuild our villages outside of India; adopting the appearances of community was easier than creating a real one.

“Yes, you know the lady that I carpool with. When I heard about her nephew I showed her a picture of Tej and she asked if they could come over for tea and meet her.”

“When?” I hadn’t taken my eyes offthe photograph. The suitor looked typically Indian: lentil eyes, a pakora nose and thin lips. His shortcomings were made somehow handsome by a mall glamour shot.

“Tonight. They will be here tonight.” Masi’s smile grew wider as she clasped her hands to her chest and looked behind me. “Oh, Tejinder, look at you, you almost look pretty!” I turned around. The perpetual scowl that stretched across Tej’s face, wrinkling her forehead and pinching her nose, had disappeared; her face had softened, as if someone had smoothed out her fleshed disappointment. “Maybe a little powder, heh?” Masi suggested, reaching into her purse for a compact. “Even out your complexion a little more. I think you have been getting too much sun.”

My mother came rushing into the room, her hands busily knotting her hair into a bun, her mouth holding the pins that would keep it in place. She stopped as she looked at me, and unclenched the pins from her frown.

“Meninder, change your clothes, you know you should not be wearing such things,” she said, pointing at my skirt.

“What’s the big deal? I’m not the one they’re coming to see.”

She poked the pins into her hair. “He has a twenty-year-old brother;

God willing, he may be perfect for you.”

Masi clapped her hands. She was always clapping her hands, as if she were aware of a rhythm to life that we could not hear. “Oh, what an idea! Two brothers marry two sisters. Just like a Hindi movie.”

“Those movies always end badly,” I said. “Someone either dies or kills for true love.”

My mother offered a tight-lipped smile. “Love shmov! That is best left to movies. Now, go change your clothes.”

That afternoon we rolled gulab jamun in coconut flakes, scattered pis-tachio crumbs on burfiand prepared the dough for samosas. Masi rammed her fist into the dough and tunnelled her fingers through, reaching out the other side, folding the dough in on itself while singing “Mere Jeevan Saathi”—My Life Partner. She batted her eyes and teased Tej with the hip-twitching choreography of a Bollywood sequence, dancing around the
kitchen with a jug of water balanced on her head, until we all collapsed into laughter. Even my mother grinned. We sat end-to-end, filling the dough cones with potatoes and sealing them with milk, Masi’s chatter filling the space between tasks. “When I was your age, girls did not meet their husband… until the wedding night,” she said, wheezing with laughter.

My mother elbowed Masi, recalling that when Masi’s betrothed had come to see her, she’d hidden in a tree. “I had to climb up the tree to get her and by the time we came back to the house, they had left,” my mother said.

“Well, no one was as lucky as your mother in marriage,” Masi said. “Your father: so kind and handsome… The village girls swooned any time he came around. He looked like he was from a Bollywood film, a young Dharmendra riding around on his motorcycle, hoping to get a look at your mother. You know, he had come to see our cousin, but when he saw your mother he asked for her hand instead.”

“Mom, you never told us that,” Tej said.

“Oy, oy, enough of this. We are falling behind,” my mother said, heating the frying oil, a flustered embarrassment about her.

It was two hours of assembly-line work that was full of gossip, the occasional giggle fit and my mother’s momentary culinary concerns turning to full-scale cooking catastrophes when she lamented the loss of one overstuffed samosa that had burst at the seams and tainted the frying oil with bits of potatoes. “Oh, ho, now look what has happened,” she said over and over, slapping her forehead.

“No matter,” Masi said, fishing the remains out with a ladle. She wrapped her arm around my mother’s shoulder. “Everything will be fine. Everything will work out.”

I watched from the kitchen as Masi led our guests into the living room, where my mother greeted them. Kishor Auntie waddled to the couch like a fat duck struggling to get to water. She dabbed at the sprays of sweat on her temples with her chunni. The young man, whose name was Mandip, was shorter and darker than he’d looked in his picture. He sat down and
examined the shag carpet, not looking at anything but his mismatched sport socks while Kishor Auntie verified our ancestry.

“Pind kera?” she asked, removing the chenille cardigan that had been stretched over her massive bosoms. I thought of the Indian woman who had sat next to me on a bus the previous week. She’d stared at me even though I was staring straight ahead, and as I shuffled in the discomfort of her glare she asked me, “Pind kera?”

I wanted to yell at her and say “Who cares? You’re in Canada now? What difference does it make what village my father was from or what caste I am.” But instead I lowered my head and answered respectfully just as my mother did.

“Patial.”

“Kishor Auntie smiled and leaned forward, her breasts resting on her distended abdomen. “We have relatives not far from there.”

“Well then, we are practically family!” Masi exclaimed. Everyone nodded and laughed nervously.

I listened until the laughter hummed into loose sighs. Our house was full of this sound each time one of my sisters got married. For days before the wedding, the house was a festival brimming with family, food and ritual happiness. Uncles, aunts, cousins—the real, the distant, the removed and the pretend—descended on our home from cities near and far to sleep on rolled-out blankets in whatever space there was. It was like a three-day carnival that, upon completion, left us with a shag carpet full of confetti. When my sister Parveen got married and moved away to Edmonton, her father-in-law assured my mother that she would be treated as his daughter. He told her that daughters are not born into their true families, and must marry into them. Though my mother knew his intentions were good, I could tell by the glaze in her eyes that she was wondering, as was I, why such good intentions reduced us to less than ourselves.

I snuck into Tej’s room, where she was pacing back and forth, flattening the shag carpet while muttering, “Sat Sri Akal Auntie” in various pitches trying to find the most pleasing tone. “Is it time?” she asked.

“For you to serve tea? No, not yet.”

She paced the length of the room again before sitting me down on the bed. “Tell me then, what are they like?”

I told her that Kishor Auntie was fat and smelled like patchouli, but had kind eyes and that Mandip seemed sincere. Sincere—that was the nicest way I could describe his hunched shoulders and insecure gaze.

“Do you think that we would look good together?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I think you’d make a really nice couple.” She looked relieved and threw her arms around me. I was taken aback by her unchar-acteristic affection, but steadied myself to her embrace. “So, is this what you want?” I asked.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I should want to fall in love, right?”

“Well, yeah. Don’t you want to choose who you love?”

She turned away. I knew she must be thinking of Preet. Although they’d just been friends, everyone had hoped it would amount to something more. I remember her crying his name on the phone, demanding to know how he could go to India to marry someone he didn’t know, someone he didn’t love. I wondered if he’d answered her between her gulping sobs. I wondered if he’d had the courage to tell her the truth that we all suspected—that since Harj’s departure we had become an even less suitable family to marry into.

Tej turned back to me and put her hands on my shoulders, her eyes locked squarely on mine. “Meena, love is never a choice. You don’t get to choose who you fall in love with. You love who is chosen for you.”

1.5

I
sat cross-legged on the floor of the gurdwara, drawing crop circles in the carpet pile the way Harj and I used to. Behind me, most of the old ladies—the bibis who sat lining the walled perimeter—kept their eyes closed and pretended to listen to the scriptures when they were actually half asleep, pins and needles in their feet occasionally jolting them awake. The aunties sat in front of them, whispering to one another out of the sides of their mouths while their buttery-faced pre-adolescent daughters twirled about, their stiffcrinoline frocks opening and closing like lace parasols. Occasionally one of the aunties would reach over and slap her daughter on the leg, forcing the girl to sit down, while little boys dashed around, sliding into imaginary bases unfettered and unchecked.

When I was these girls’ age I was allowed to play outside with the boys after the prayers. We played Simon Says in the empty parking lot and frozen tag between parked cars, and sometimes we climbed the balconies of the temple, pressing our fleshy cheeks against the windows to see inside. I’d wave at my sisters, who sat like ducklings on the carpet next to my mother, and wait for their stern disapproval before skipping offto join a game of tag. Once I darted into the parking lot so quickly that a car struck me. The driver was a woman my mother’s age; she emerged panicked and flustered, yelling at me that I should have been more careful. Adults gathered around me in a circle, protecting and scolding me, treating me almost the same
way they did the woman who’d hit me. After that, God and temple were no longer things to play at and I joined my sisters inside, learning how to be quiet and well behaved.

Fortunately my mother made us go to the temple only when we were invited. Though she believed in God, she didn’t believe in lengthy prayers. She said they never helped. The only time I’d seen her pray was after Harj left, when for days she’d flipped through the
Guru Granth Sahib,
mouthing words and stopping only for food and water. Illiterate in two languages, she turned the pages too quickly and came to the end before her prayer recitation was complete. Like everything else, she knew God only by memory.

Serena’s mother-in-law was standing before the
Guru Granth Sahib
throne, which was canopied in silk fabric and tinsel garland reminiscent of Christmas decor. She had put her money in the trough and stood with her eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer. After a minute she knelt, touched her head to the floor, rose and repeated the action—a theatrical display of faith that Tej and I snickered about. Serena kicked me in the back with her foot and when I turned around she raised her index finger to her mouth. Her mother-in-law made her way over and sat down next to us, forcing us into silence. She glanced my way and smiled until her eyes disappeared into slits. She smiled so hard I thought her gums would bleed. When I turned away, I could sense her kohl-lined eyes sizing me up and looking me over in the same measured beats as the tabla, until the music finally stopped.

BOOK: Everything Was Good-Bye
6.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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