Kalyana Page 22

  I asked Mother privately why she did not talk to Angela. She told me it was because Angela spoke in English, and her own English was not very good. I told my mother that she could reply in Hindi, for Angela was Indian. My mother only shook her head.

  At the coffee house, Mother sat at a far table, invisible. I saw her smile a little when one of the members told a story of a talking teapot. But I observed not much else. I had thought Mother would like to sit among storytellers, listening to their words, but then I realized she would rather have been the one telling the stories. Perhaps that is why she sat in the corner, quiet and unseen.

  During her stay with us, Mother suffered bouts of hot flashes. She would be sitting in the middle of the living room, when suddenly she would grab a newspaper off the shelf, screaming for me to open the windows and let the chilly breeze inside. “Oh, my God,” she would gasp, her dress drenched in sweat. “This is the curse bestowed upon an aging woman.” She would fan harder and faster. “See, Kalyana. A woman is not spared discomfort in old age as well. Instead of blood, sweat is pouring from me like a river.”

  The cool breeze flowing in through the open windows would dissipate the warm temperature in the room, but not my mother’s suffering. She would sit on the floor, fanning and cursing: womanhood and sweat and blood and old age. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would hear her moving in the kitchen, then the crackle of ice in a glass.

  Mother had brought spices and tea, Indian sweets, and several tins of canned mutton; shirts and dresses for Aditi and Kirtan that proved to be two sizes too small; and the latest edition of The Fiji Times newspaper. Reports of how an Indian temple was burned to the ground covered the front page.

  “See what we Indians are suffering through in Fiji, Kalyana. See!” She pointed to the wrinkled paper sitting on our glass coffee table. Then she shook her head in contempt.

  “Move to Canada, Mom,” I offered. “Kirtan and I can sponsor you.”

  She fired me a piercing look. “Run away? Never! I was born there, and the ashes from my dead body will mix with the Pacific Ocean. I have as much right to that country as anyone else.” Her chest rose and fell as she breathed heavily.

  Mother brought years of political news bundled up in her dupatta. Since I had left, she said, Fiji had seen each democratically elected government overthrown by the government succeeding it. There was murder and mutiny and hostage-taking and democracy and military rule, all in quick succession. Domination and submission were entwined within each other. Pain and suffering. Revenge, and more revenge, in the hope of empowerment. Gone were the peaceful days of calmness and stability. Though, in Fiji, my mother said, the flowers still bloomed and the ocean still whispered.

  And yet, flowers and oceans were not enough to make it into the paradise it once had seemed. The people did not know who was coming or going, my mother said. Because of the political situation, even Fiji’s sugarcane industry was starting to crumble. What would become of the country now? My mother wrung her hands and shook her head. Aditi sat still and stared.

  I stacked the newspaper away on a shelf, under the copies of the Vancouver Sun.

  After two and a half weeks of visiting our little family, Mother decided that she wanted to see Manjula before she left for home. It was then that she witnessed Kirtan and I fight. It was a small stone under in the mattress of a married couple, but the beginning of a new cycle of understanding for me.

  It began when Kirtan suggested that Aditi stay with his sister and brother-in-law after school while Mother and I were in Toronto, since Angela could not watch her. Angela maintained a full-time job teaching religion and gender courses at the university, and she was buried under the crunch of assignments and essays.

  I could feel my blood rise, my heart beating faster. Leaving Aditi with her uncle while I was far away on the other side of Canada? That was not possible for me. If my mother had not been able to reach out and save me when I lay calling her name, how could I watch out for Aditi’s safety from thousands of miles away?

  I protested fiercely. “I don’t want her staying with relatives, Kirtan. Why don’t you take a few days off work and stay home?”

  “He won’t do anything. He’s not like that,” yelled Kirtan.

  My mother straightened her back. I could see the question in her eyes and the horror in her face: Does he know?

  “I just don’t feel comfortable,” I said.

  “She’ll grow up scared of everything if you don’t allow her to test her boundaries.”

  I looked at Aditi’s face and her small body. A flood of memories came sweeping in, a tsunami threatening to swallow a whole village.

  “What boundaries should she test at this age, Kirtan?” My breathing was labored. “No. You take days off from work and stay home with her. Or I won’t go.”

  So, in the end, without further arguments, Kirtan succumbed. He understood my fears, because after I had confessed everything to Angela that night under the blooming cherry blossoms, I had come home and cried in Kirtan’s arms. He had remembered the day back in Fiji, when I had cut my arm, and he had punched the tree, hurting his knuckles.

  Kirtan took the days off work and agreed to stay home with Aditi, while Mother and I traveled to Toronto to see Manjula.

  32

  We boarded the plane to cross the country together, just Mother and I. At first, all Mother could talk about was me eating poutine at the airport. The calories. The lack of nutrients. Poutine? Who invented this dish, anyway? Mother had ordered chick-pea-and-masala curry with basmati rice for herself. She did not want to try Canadian food at all, despite my attempts to persuade her. But she criticized as she watched me swallow fry after fry laden in cheese curds and gravy. Some were delicately topped with ketchup, like a cherry plunked on a mountain of whipped cream.

  Manjula picked us up at the airport in Toronto. She wore brown corduroy pants, a plain white shirt, and black flat shoes. She stood in front of us, jingling her car keys. “Kaise,” she said in Hindi. “How are you?” The two sisters kissed each other’s cheeks. An aura of white light surrounded them both. I counted in my head. Ten? Twenty? Or had it already been thirty years since I had seen them together? I was eleven when Manjula had left, but now I had a daughter of my own a year older than that.

  I thought of the years since I had seen my own brother. I missed his punches, his drawl, and his self-assured swagger. Now he was a married man with three children of his own. If he saw me, would he still tease and taunt me? I wondered if he teased his wife or children.

  Manjula took my mother’s bag from her hands. “Kalyana, you can carry your own bag,” she said, chuckling loudly. I had forgotten her odd, hollow laugh. Other travelers twisted their heads to look at us, making me blush in shame as though I were a small child again.

  Expertly Manjula hefted my mother’s bag onto her shoulder and carried it out to her car. Then she climbed into the driver’s seat and took the wheel. Mother gasped. She had become accustomed to Manjula driving back in Fiji, but that was many years ago. Now she shuddered in horror as Manjula wove in and out of the congestion of Toronto traffic, passing buses and gigantic trucks, driven by both women and men.

  Trepidation marked my mother’s tiny face as she gazed at the skyscrapers and crowds of foreign people swarming around her. “Downtown Toronto is too noisy. Not like Fiji.” She nodded her head, looking intently out the car window as she clutched the sides of the seat. “Too much concrete. Toronto needs more trees.” How was all this hustle and bustle and the heat and rush of Canadian city life not taking its toll on Manjula? Her sister looked healthy and self-possessed. “It’s too much activity for my old bones,” Mother said sighing. “My heart is going thump-thump-thump.”

  Manjula smirked, overflowing with confidence.

  Before she took us to her home, Manjula brought us to a nearby mall. A mysterious smile lit up her face. “I want to show you something,” sh
e said quickly. We followed her through the sliding glass doors and towards the escalator. My mother hesitated.

  Manjula held onto her free hand and said, “It just takes getting used to, Sister. The first time you always feel dizzy. Don’t worry. I’ve got your hand.” My mother clutched the rubber handrails of the moving stairs and closed her eyes tightly.

  Manjula smiled at me over my mother’s head. “How did she handle the escalator at the airports?” she asked.

  “We took the stairs,” said my mother abruptly. She kept gripping Manjula’s hand, occasionally glancing nervously back at me.

  At the top of the stairs, we looked down a corridor and saw something that stopped even my mother’s voice: Manjula’s name across the front of a small store. Manjula’s Alterations it said behind a blinking light. Manjula nudged us towards the door.

  Two middle-aged women, one Indian and one Caucasian, looked up from their sewing machines and greeted us the moment we entered. “My sister and my niece,” said Manjula, nodding at us. She hovered over both women, leaning over their machines to inspect their work. “Good, good,” she said to the Caucasian woman, and to the Indian one, “Not too tight.” She moved into the back room, passing rows of dresses and shirts hanging on a metal rack. She took out her keys and unlocked a gray door, pushing it back so that it swung open into a small room. Her head was held high. “My office,” she said to us proudly.

  Shelves were stacked with paper and material and patterns. In the corner case, a bucket of needles and different colors of thread sat on the top shelf; beneath it, scissors, patterns, and sewing books were carefully arranged side by side. “I am the boss here,” Manjula said, sitting back on a black chair that swiveled like the headmaster’s. “I’ve got three employees. One is on her day off.” She shuffled through a few papers, pretending to look for something.

  Mother gazed upon her long-lost sister, and it seemed as though she had come to Toronto searching for someone far different. For the old Manjula, the Manjula who speared crabs, tended to vast gardens, quietly cleaned our house, and accepted her inferior place—that Manjula was long gone.

  “How’s business?” I asked to ease the tension.

  “Good. Good,” she replied in English, looking up from the documents. “Steady. I have return clientele. Graduation and Christmas seasons are always very busy. People want their dresses adjusted to fit better all the time.” She smiled widely. “Peter helped me build my business. I’ve owned it for sixteen years now.”

  My mother looked at her sister. Pride was evident in the glow of her gaze.

  Manjula rose from the chair. “Let’s go,” she said with firmness, and headed for the door.

  Manjula’s home was in Mississauga. “Condo living,” she said as she pulled into an underground parking lot. “Peter and I like it better than owning a house.” Manjula carried my mother’s bags and I brought my own. She was limping, just like old times. I hadn’t noticed earlier, when we had been in her store, in the office where she held the reins of business just like my father had. “We just pay a fee and someone else takes care of the outside,” Manjula was explaining to my mother. “A house is for people with kids. Ours are all grown up.” By “ours,” I understood that she meant Peter’s boys from his first marriage. As far as I knew, Manjula never had given birth to her own child. Yet, unlike Angela, Manjula, by no effort of her own, but through the grace of fate, had found motherhood after all.

  “What about gardening?” I said. “You used to love to garden.”

  She laughed. “Oh, that’s too much work. I am too old now. And anyway,” she said, “in Toronto, the gardening season is short-lived. Gardening months are June, July, and August. That’s it. The rest of the time the ground is covered in a sheet of ice. Not like Fiji, huh,” she looked at me, and smiled. “In the summer, I grow some flowers in buckets and put them out on the balcony.”

  She paused in front of the elevator and pushed the big red button. We heard the elevator tumbling down. “I grow my own herbs inside in small ceramic pots, though,” she said. “I keep it in the kitchen. It’s nice to have fresh herbs all year round.”

  “Do you speak Hindi at all now, Manjula, or only English?” my mother said, shaking her head.

  Manjula chuckled.

  As the elevator slid upwards, my mother suddenly collapsed, clutching the metal side. Manjula and I both crouched over her in alarm. Mother claimed that her chest felt tight, as if her heart was going to jump forth and fall to the floor in a matter of minutes. “I don’t like this elevator stuff,” she said. “I don’t like being closed up like this, in a moving box. It feels like a flying coffin. Can’t we take the stairs?”

  Manjula and I exchanged glances of relief. “It’s eight floors, Sumitri. Hard to walk up,” said Manjula, rubbing my mother’s back.

  “I feel like I am having a heart attack.” My mother, a collapsing brick house, strained to breathe.

  The elevator doors slid open as quickly as they had closed. My mother continued gasping unevenly. She had had many shocks today, and not all of them were physical.

  Manjula directed us to her condominium. It was clean and comfortable, with everything in its proper place: a vase with fresh daffodils in one corner, an old-fashioned lamp tucked away in another, and white drapes in the living room. A long sofa was pushed up against the far wall, opposite the entertainment unit. It was a three-bedroom apartment that looked out to the city lights in the far distance.

  My mother stood near the window, holding her chest. “Oh my God,” she said, “You’re living in mid-air, Manjula. Why don’t you come back to the ground? I feel very scared being this high up.”

  “Don’t worry, Sister. Nothing will happen to us.”

  “What will you do when a hurricane comes? It will snatch this building up in seconds. It’s a long way to the ground, Manjula. It’s a long way down.”

  Manjula playfully rolled her eyes. “Sumitri,” she said, “there are no hurricanes in Canada, only in Fiji.”

  “What about tornadoes? You have tornadoes, don’t you?”

  “Sumitri, don’t worry. They’ll warn us way before it hits. We’ll have time to move to the ground and find a bathtub to hide in.” She chuckled loudly again, not caring if the neighbors heard her. I suppose she was happy. For that, I think, she felt she owed no one an apology or an explanation.

  For supper that night, Manjula cooked crab curry, just as she had back in Fiji so many years ago. Peter sat watching hockey on TV, speaking once in a while to comment on the recent political happenings in Fiji. In spite of his age, he still looked attractive. He called Manjula by several nicknames: Manj, Manju, and sometimes he called her Jules, lovingly. It made me think of Raju. It had been many years since somebody had shortened my name in Canada. My heart ached.

  “Remember how we used to catch crabs in Fiji?” Manjula intercepted my thoughts as we sat down to eat at the small dining table. The spoons clattered against the glass bowl of crab curry. A silver plate of steaming rotis sat in the middle of the table. “You couldn’t wait to have seconds and thirds when we got home and cooked them.” Manjula’s face lit up with a bright smile.

  Snippets of memories flooded my mind: I recalled how Manjula, with alert eyes and a wooden spear in her hand, had stabbed the sand in search of crabs. My job had been to drag the heavy sack filled with squirming crabs across moist sand and shallow waters, but when we were finished and Manjula had hoisted the full sack over her shoulder, I would run ahead and shout back to her, “Slowpoke!” I remembered the lumps of brown meat floating in the bowls later, and how my stomach would churn. I always ended the meal by pushing my full plate away.

  “Remember?” my aunt persisted.

  “Yep,” I shrugged. My memory of eating crabs was evidently much different than hers.

  “These are store-bought, from the Atlantic Ocean.” Manjula crinkled her nose. “Pacific Ocean crabs, th
e saltwater crabs, are much better,” she said. “If I was in Fiji right now, I would grab a spear and go down to the ocean and catch fresh, live crabs for all of us. It would taste so good.” She licked her lips and flirtatiously blinked her eyes.

  “You can’t fish in the sea anymore,” said my mother.

  “What do you mean?” Peter said. Manjula squinted.

  “New law since the new government.” My mother looked sad. “Government says that the sea belongs to Fijians only. Indians are not Fijians, so they are not allowed to take from it.”

  Manjula gasped. I sat wide-eyed. Peter looked down at his plate.

  “Fijians charge forty to sixty dollars per crab. Sometimes more.” My mother sighed. “Eating crabs is a luxury now for us Indians.” She looked around at the aghast faces and tried to bring cheer back to the table. “It is not all bad. Some folks, Indians and Fijians, are advocating naming all citizens of Fiji ‘Fijians’ to form unity and one national identity. They say that Indians of Fiji feel no ties, no connection to the land of India. Not anymore. Perhaps change in the name will change our future. It will bring back some of our lost rights.” She shrugged then said, “Who knows? I am starting to think that even God doesn’t know anymore, either.”

  Manjula and my mother talked deep into the night. They spoke of the days now long gone, and about the future: Raju’s children, my daughter, and Manjula and Peter’s grown boys at foreign universities. They reminisced about old crushes, Davindra and Shalendra. How they would spy on them from behind a line of palm trees, by the Suva Point, and from store windows in the middle of Suva town. They hummed their favorite Hindi songs out of tune and snacked on store-bought barfi and galebi, complaining about the staleness.

  Watching Manjula and my mother gab late into the night, made me yearn for Angela’s company, while I quietly watched television with Peter, absorbing it all. Manjula told my mother that she went to church every Sunday with Peter, that she was a Christian now. She showed my mother the gold cross Peter had bought for her five Christmases ago. She kept it close to her chest for protection. I wondered what had happened to my small gold charm that I had left behind on the windowsill. Was it still there, collecting grime and dust? Or had it been carelessly chucked in the rubbish bin by the next tenants? I liked to believe that it was now resting on some young schoolgirl’s bedside table, keeping her safe from unrelenting fears and all-consuming nightmares of snakes and Surgeon-Superintendents, of knights and dragons, of spiders and tigers.