When She Was Queen Read online

  The aunt and uncle said they had to consult the girl, and of course the rest of the family. They felt they had been misled by the boy, who had come into the girl’s life as an uncle.

  Humorous comments were made about the boldness of love—not to say its folly. And after all, hadn’t everyone heard of uncles and aunts younger than their nieces and nephews? The boy came highly recommended, was truly a gem; all three elders personally vouched for him.

  As parting shot, one of the sisters, the steno, remarked, “After all, the girl is your trust and you should do what’s in her interest, even though it may get difficult for you around the house once she’s gone.”

  It was a mild taunt. The guardians said they would consider the proposal, as was natural, and the visitors left in good spirits. All three women insisted on giving Anaar a kiss.

  By this time any doubts Anaar had (and there had been queasy moments) had vanished; she wanted to get married, to get away to Upanga, a life in the suburbs, a car, her own room and house, all the things she couldn’t have now. When her aunt and uncle tried to prevail upon her, she told them cruelly what Amir’s sister had only hinted at: “If I were your own daughter, you wouldn’t let me miss this golden opportunity to move up in life. You only need me here to help you around the house and shop.”

  The engagement was duly announced. But once this hurdle was past, the consent of marriage given, there was no acrimony left over, the two families were like one big family. And Amir was a most attentive and charming fiancé who bore no grudges.

  “We’ll hardly see her now,” Farida says, watching me pour our tea.

  It’s Friday evening, mosque time, and we usually dispense with dinner on this day, making do with a tea and something light later in the evening.

  “I said we’ll hardly see her now,” she says.

  What I say, in agreement, is a straight-faced lie. I’m not even surprised how easily it comes, though I’m not a habitual liar. Yes, there’s a feeling akin to a weight on the heart, but not enough to crush; there’s no real dread or terror at the possibilities I may be invoking. That ability to feel finely has been lost—what with thoughts of mortality and anxieties about the children, one is too far from the precipice, there’s nothing fragile left to break, all is custom, routine; affection and habit. That’s not necessarily so bad.

  Anaar has now a place of her own, and her house has found a buyer, too. She has no longer need of my services as an agent. But she continues to draw me, to her apartment on Yonge or the coffee shop down below, to which I occasionally head like an automaton oblivious to anything but the moment before me.

  “Did she act strangely with you at all?” my wife asks. “Did you find out what’s wrong with her? Why would she spit on a corpse—when we’ve all come to mourn and forgive, at a holy place, with so many people around? She’s not gone crazy, has she?”

  “Perhaps she couldn’t forgive him.”

  “What can’t one forgive in death? What can be so grievous?”

  “Beats me.”

  At another time, in the past, I would have told her without a thought; this time I feel beholden to a confidence. Why keep this secret from her, develop a niche in my heart for another soul? I am at a loss to explain. In the past few weeks I’ve quite lost my head, though if you saw me you wouldn’t notice, I’d be your same old jolly caring mukhi with a patient ear and ready smile, with a large friendly network that supplies me prospective clients and business tips out of gratitude. Deep within me I’ve become victim to memories and images from the past, perilous yearnings; and an uncontrollable, you might say suicidal, desire to put it all down.

  In Dar we had two kinds of pretty girls: the tall and thin kind, with long hair, traditional—Anaar’s type; and the shorter ones with softer features and modish short hair—Farida’s type. Of course, nowadays all of them have short hair.

  Farida was from an established though unaffected family who owned one of the city’s two bakeries and were known for their services to the community. Her manner reflected this background; she was not shy, nor haughtily aloof, but her easy, friendly nature seemed curbed by a wary reserve that demanded its proper distance. If you were thick-skinned, as teenage boys tended to be, she was adept with an appropriate and quite arrogant snub, as I once found out. We used to return from our separate schools in separate groups, boys and girls, and one day I let fly out a silly jibe in her direction, pertaining to her family’s business, in the belief that to tease was a way to win a girl’s heart. I went home red-faced. Then some months later to my immense excitement I saw her alone, straggling behind her group; I was alone too and hurried to join her. She was friendly, her twinkling eyes recalling that snub, which had already earned me a lasting nickname among the boys. And so we began our small incidental meetings, and without any formality fell in with each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. A childhood romance. A girl to be close to; a boy to tell things to.

  “The wedding night,” Anaar says with a tinge of a blush.

  From my vantage point up here in her living room, Yonge Street stretches down, in a series of yellow street-lamps and moving car lights, all the way south to the lakeshore, to the blinking CN Tower. It is beautiful, the street, the city, at night, a magical scape of thousands of lights. And up here, except for our voices, all is quiet, hushed. From what she says, I form my own picture of what transpired that night that traumatized her so.

  The hotel picked for the night by Amir and his family, perhaps by accident as they claimed, but most likely because of an offered discount, was well located by the sea, but that Saturday it clamoured with the din of dancing and music from the lounge directly below the couple’s room. She lost her mood, which was not helped by the groom’s family and friends coming to inspect the room, make sly remarks, and have photographs taken—all part of a repulsive and new tradition then, mercifully no longer in existence now. Amir apologized—he was always nice—and promised that the rooms for their honeymoon, at the national parks, would all be perfect.

  Amir was somewhat limp, I surmise, nervous; inexperienced, she says, though I am not sure what she means, experience being evidence of moral depravity in those days. She herself had an inkling of what was expected—from books (she refuses to name any, with a coy smile) and talking to a girl whose sister had recently married. She was a healthy girl, she says. At some point in their tentative foreplay she mounted him and took her pleasure. At the critical moment for her, her eyes fell upon the wall in front of her, saw a small bright spot some three fourths of the way up. The room was in partial darkness, a dim pervasive glow intruding into their privacy from the square courtyard outside, with its garden of rocks and plants and large globe lights under which couples courted. It was, Anaar says, of that spot on the wall, a blink of light that quickly disappeared, leaving behind a speck to blend in with the other shadows in the room. Momentarily she feared that she and her husband had been spied upon through an aperture in the wall. Such incidents had been heard of. But she convinced herself the world was not really so evil, that the spot was due to some incidental reflection from outside, and went to sleep more anxious about her future.

  The next morning, though, getting out of bed while he was in the shower, she inspected the wall above the headboard and discovered a round hole the width of her little finger. She didn’t tell her husband. All she wanted was to get out of there as quickly as possible, though she couldn’t very well deny her husband and their friends the brunch at the hotel that was part of the wedding celebration.

  That incident, that night, ruined for her the rest of her life; her interest in her husband, in having children (though she did have a son). It filled her with depression, dread, hatred. If she didn’t take her life, it was due to that hate, for one man.

  “Who was he?”

  “As we checked out of the hotel, at the front desk sat the owner’s son—Salim Damani. He grinned at us and said something I dare not repeat—but it’s been playing in my head over and over like a tape ever si
nce. It was he who had been peeping at us. In that moment he had stolen my entire existence, robbed me of my faith, any belief in anything … and he knew that I knew.”

  She looks at me with those intense eyes in that fine face. I realize again how soft her voice is, not having risen even once, and yet strangely so full of expression.

  “He had intruded into and defiled my most private, my woman’s moment. I could have killed him, gouged his eyes out—whenever I saw him standing outside the mosque in the evening with the other men; I could have torn out the flesh from that pocked face. One day on Jamhuri Street I saw his wife and small child crossing the road—he married not long after me—I was driving our Cortina, and there they were and I was glaring at them in all madness—but some good angel held me back. Salim was inside a shop and he came tearing out, perhaps having seen me through the door or shop window. I don’t know what I might have done in those days. Outwardly I was normal, I had a husband and a son, but inside I was seething, a wounded female seeking desperately somehow to avenge that offence, that violence done to me. How many times I wished he would simply die and rid me of him. Whenever I passed the mosque and read the chalkboard containing the latest death announcement, I would wish it were him, that if I rubbed out the name written there and wrote his instead, he would truly die.

  “When it became possible to come to Canada, Amir and I were among the first to apply—I couldn’t have stayed there a day longer than necessary, where he resided, that piece of filth who continued to pollute me with every sight I had of him.

  “I imagined him festering in Dar, in the heat and mud and the growing potholes and the smells of garbage not picked up….”

  While she removed herself to an antithetical cooler universe of temperance and restraint, order and form, sliding noiselessly into the future.

  In Toronto, Dar’s Asians found themselves in the new high-rises of Don Mills, which reminded one more and more of the hometown neighbourhoods as new immigrants, old acquaintances, arrived. You left on the 100 or the 26 bus to go to, to search for, work; weekends you shopped till you dropped, from discount store to discount store, across the city, when a dollar meant so much more. Remembered from this distance in time, they were days of shame, when none of us had cars and we travelled in flocks on public transit fearing racial taunts and attacks. Anaar found a job almost immediately, like many of the women, as a typist; Amir languished from one unsuitable job to the next. He was in his forties, not especially suited to anything though capable and more than willing, and was soon humiliated and broken, all his former stature gone. But they worked hard, put up the down payment for a car, then for a house in a new development.

  A rented room in the basement of the Flemingdon Park Mall was the first mosque. There, every evening, especially Fridays, you went to be part of one big communal family. You exchanged news from home (the worse it got there, the better you felt here) and met new arrivals, you found out about all the specials at the food, clothing, and furniture stores in town. One Friday evening, her eye alighting upon a new attendee at this makeshift mosque, her heart sank and she gave a whimper: “Y’Allah!” It was Salim Damani—older, humbler: taking around a brazier smoking with incense among the male congregation. It did not take her long to detect Salim’s wife sitting two rows in front of her.

  It was as well she and her husband moved to their house in York Mills. But after a year, like many others, the Damanis followed suit and she kept running into him at the new mosque there. Of course he was now a respectable member of the community. But she continued to hate him with the bitterest bile, never replied to his unctuously uttered “God bless, sister.”

  Once, in front of people, he manipulated her into shaking hands with him, and on another occasion, during a community picnic, when everyone had joined in for a game of “dodge-the-ball,” he put himself in a position close behind her. She gave a howl of anguish, which in the merriment of the occasion no one else quite heeded; but he knew. And she was sure he had done it on purpose.

  She retired from the game, went home early. And that night she cried her heart out, wept and wept, no one could stop her, until she’d washed herself out, and fell asleep.

  Years passed. Her son grew up. She and her husband held office in the community, earned respect, became established. The fire in her abated, but did not die altogether. Finally, twenty years after their arrival in Toronto, her husband brought home the news one morning from the mosque—

  “Salim Damani died—last night.”

  She gasped. “How?”

  “Heart attack—while working around the house. His wife says he was tired and had sat down to rest in the living room in front of the TV—that’s where he passed away. Did you know he was part owner of two hotels?”

  “Do you think I overdid it—my anger?” she asks.

  I look away, at the ceiling, which is dark and in shadow, at the glory of lights that is Yonge Street down below. How can I ever imagine what it meant to her, that one scorching moment in the life of a tender, raw nineteen-year-old girl back home, and what that moment did to all the other moments of her life? But I feel a heavy sense of sadness in me, I cannot tell you quite why. And I also feel a hint of anger, or bitterness, I know not where to direct it.

  The Sky to Stop Us

  His wife had left him. Her sports car was not in the driveway, the pool area normally cacophonous at this hour with the screams and laughter of his daughter Zafira and her neighbourhood friends seemed weirdly forlorn; there was no sign of the kitchen having seen use recently, and there were four phone messages, the first one from 12:12, as one of their friends precisely logged it. And there was this note on the table in the family room: I’ve gone away for a while with Z, will call you later. I want to think things over for myself.—A.

  How serious was it? He brought his chilled beer glass to his chin and mulled over that, feeling suddenly uncontrollably tearful. It’s the tiredness; you want to come home at night to pour out your frustrations and be comforted, not for this. What did it mean? Had it been coming? Had he seen the symptoms? She had taken to making certain kinds of statements lately, to chaff him—so he had interpreted them. One of these days I should leave you. The idea had seemed unthinkable. The remarks would needle him, for how easily they came to her; why make them, he had thought, why the empty threats? Not so empty now. And right in the midst of a major deal worth millions, many millions perhaps … right when the world was his, theirs, for those with the guts and the smarts to take and hold in their hands; opportunities, vistas, were opening up before them one after another without end. Why would she want to put brakes on that, deny him all that?

  The telephone rang, quickly he picked it up. It was his father. Nazir’s fingers tightened around the receiver; just what he needed at this moment, like a hole in the head, to comfort his lonely old father in his cluttered room at the Victoria Park senior citizens’ apartments. Did you take your walk, he asked dutifully, calmly, you need the exercise—Yes, said the old man, grateful for the attention, he had walked the length of the corridor three times; Are you going to mosque today, you should, to get out—the bus steps were too high for his arthritic knees, came the reply, he could go if had a car ride; Take a taxi, then, haven’t I told you you can? And so on. Following which, critiques of various people. The cleaning woman Zarin had stolen his slippers and he had asked her not to return. Why would Zarin steal your old slippers? How should I know? It was no use arguing with him. Let him ramble on about the woman across the hall, the Pakistani man two floors above, the other woman who was only pretending to be a senior for the cheap rent although she had the strength of a horse…. And after that, a list of things required from the shops—soap, paper flowers, paper plates…. Nazir imagined himself physically exploding while listening to all this, his blood gushing out of his heart and ears, his guts spewing all over the place, and his father’s crackling voice going on and on and on like the rusty springs of a rickety truck on an endless road…. Give the man a chance, he�
��s lonely.

  By the time his dad hung up, there was a message waiting, from his own son in Montreal. He called back, found Shaf.

  Hi, Dad. Mum told me—

  Where is she?

  I can’t tell you that—

  Why not? Don’t you care about me—about us? About the family unit—

  Take it easy, Dad. I promised. I can’t tell. Not now. Give her a chance, let’s work it out.

  You tell me where she is and I’ll work it out with her, I promise you.

  Like he’d done all these years. Given her everything she wanted, and more. A million-dollar house that all their friends drooled over; a sports car of her own; a housemaid; the kids in private schools; dinners ordered in or eaten out; parties, cruises, holidays. They had gone from rags to riches in two decades, together, why would she do this to him? All he asked for was the time to do what he had to do. And that had been her constant quibble: you’re not home long enough, like other husbands and fathers. Do they have what we have? he would ask hotly. Of course not.

  No mean achievement that, rags to riches. They had done the immigrants’ apartment route in Don Mills, gone hustling after cheap prices from one end of town to another, considered themselves fortunate to be consuming fast foods and calories as a treat … all that, yet at work they hit the glass ceiling early on, she in a lawyer’s office where a British accent and white skin meant you were visible and up front, while she was relegated to the dungeons of the archives, too reserved, too nervous to ask for more, for her right to opportunity; and he as a loan clerk in a bank downtown where the manager craved nothing more than to push him out, which he eventually did. But he, Nazir, a grocer’s son, did two things right: he bought a rental unit on Spadina when property there was dirt cheap, in partnership with three others, a Bengali and two Chinese, and just before real estate prices went boom in the eighties; and while at the bank he was smart enough to invest in the money market, watching how others made their fortunes. Then one day he told Almas, Love, you don’t have to work for those sons of bitches, you stay home and bring up little Shaf here and that girl who’s on the way. Where we’re going there’s only the sky to stop us, and if you recall your high school science, even the sky’s an illusion. And he himself told his manager to piss off, to put it mildly. He sold off his portfolio for a huge profit; with his partners he renovated the property on Spadina, converted it into an international hostel, sold it. He was rolling. He bought a bigger hotel on the Don Valley that was badly managed and made it turn a profit; then sold it. He was growing; his partners were growing; Toronto was growing. And now to spurn that, for some sentimental reason, because he didn’t have time to play baseball with the kids … or sit with them for dinner, because he was out there making sure his son had a Honda Civic to take to college and his fees would be paid at Harvard if he made it … which he didn’t, but McGill wasn’t so bad either.