Stealing Nasreen

by Farzana Doctor

  Sometimes, while cleaning offices, he glances over desks, reading scrawled case-notes about depression, or anxiety, or family problems. He knows that these notes are confidential and that he shouldn’t be reading them, but he can’t help himself. He has even opened patient files left on desks, caressing their cardboard covers before reading their mysteries inside. Sometimes the entries are rather dull: “John came to the appointment suitably attired. He states his mood was low all month, and shoplifted once this week.” Sometimes the notes are stranger and more interesting to him: “Allison says that she hears voices while traveling on the TTC. She reports feeling afraid to travel by subway, but not by bus.” He wonders about these Canadian people and why they seem to have so many problems. Such complicated problems. He has never heard of these things back home. Yes, of course some of the men in his family sometimes drank a little, and once in a while he heard about people’s marital problems. But hearing voices? Fears of transit? Depression? What do these white people have to feel depressed about anyway? After all, he and his family have been through so much and they are not going around depressed and drinking and shoplifting.

  He wonders what a counsellor would write about him. “Shaffiq is a nosy man who hates his job, and came to the interview dressed in janitor’s clothes.” Or, “Shaffiq has a florid imagination and thinks jealous thoughts about people who work from nine to five.” He laughs out loud at his own joke.

  He lets himself into one of the offices, scans the room and empties a garbage can containing a half-eaten (tuna?) sandwich, a coffee cup (no big surprise) and some plastic wrap. Nothing so interesting. Looking around, he sees that the plants are dry and wilted. On the desk is a muddle of paper, pens, and folders. Back home, he had a little cubicle, which he kept scrupulously tidy and organized. If he had had the privilege of such a nice, big office, surely it would have been better kept than this. He turns off the light, shuts the door, and pushes his cart further down the hallway.

  Nasreen doesn’t go to bed until after Springer. She likes the late night, loves to stay up into the darkness, and although the TV is raging about lesbians who have cheated on their boyfriends and girlfriends, she considers this her quiet time. When the phone rings, she thinks she might ignore it, but then senses that something could be wrong. She mutes the TV and answers it after the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Nasreen, Oh good, it’s your father. You’re home.”

  “What’s up, Dad? You’re usually in bed by now.”

  “Yes, but I just had to tell you my news. I called earlier and left you a message. Didn’t you get it?”

  “I forgot to check my messages today,” Nasreen lies. She listened to all her messages earlier, but skipped over his.

  “Well, today I won a trip for two to any destination of my choice! Can you believe it? Anywhere in the world! It was from a contest I entered online!” Nasreen’s father retired last year and has started using words like “online.” Before his retirement, he barely knew how to use a typewriter. Now with the whole day for leisure, his favourite pastime has become entering contests and trying to get “free stuff” on the “net.”

  “Oh, that’s great Dad. Where are you gonna go?”

  “Well of course I’m going Home. You know we haven’t visited since a few years before your mom died. I want to see everyone again. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “Really? A trip to India? Well, I uh…,” she stammers. This she wasn’t expecting.

  “Everyone will want to see you too. We’ll have a great time,” he says enthusiastically.

  “Gee Dad, but –”

  “And we don’t get to spend much time together these days. You haven’t come to visit me for awhile. This would be a nice time for us to be together too.”

  “Oh I don’t know. When were you going to go? I don’t know if I can take time off work,” Nasreen says, tiredly.

  “But it is a free trip! Surely you can plan to take time off. You work so hard. You really should take some time off. Don’t you want to go to India?” he asks, in a tone that sounds like a plea to her.

  “Let me think about it. Why don’t I call you tomorrow after I’ve checked out my vacation time?”

  “Fine, fine. Think about it then. I hope you come with me. Who else could I ask otherwise? You know, since you mother died, I haven’t taken any vacations because I didn’t want to go alone.” Nasreen feels a familiar pain in her sternum that her therapist aptly labelled Daughter Guilt.

  “Well, thanks for asking me, Dad. I’ll call you tomorrow, OK?”

  “Goodnight, then. Sleep well, Nasreen.”

  “Goodnight.” She hears his sigh just before she hangs up the phone.

  She stares at the silent TV, wondering what she should do. Two women who don’t look like lesbians to her are swinging at each other while three beefy bouncers try to separate them. The audience goes wild.

  She considers her father’s proposal. After all, she has been thinking about taking a vacation, just not with her father, and not India. The last family trip was not much fun for her. She was treated like a twelve-year-old by her relatives who seemed to want to feed her all the time. She got sick a lot. She couldn’t understand anything anyone said to her and then felt embarrassed when her cousins laughed at her for not knowing Gujarati. There were endless visits to family she didn’t know and more eating to do. She felt bullied by the persistent questions: “What are you up to now?” “When are you getting married?” “Are you looking for a boy in India?” Often she felt like she was being scoped out as someone’s nephew’s potential bride.

  Nasreen turns off the TV and heads to bed. She rolls herself into the down quilt and dark blue sheets her friends bought for her last year on her thirtieth birthday. Id joins her, curling up on the pillow next to her, the side that has been vacant since the break-up. Before long, Nasreen is asleep and dreaming about swimming in the Indian Ocean with her mother and father. She is wearing an orange salwar kameez, the thin dupatta floating up around her body. The sun is warm on her face. Her mother does the butterfly stroke, splashing away from her while her father treads water nearby. She feels light and calm. She floats over to some steep wooden steps and climbs them. As she emerges from the water she realizes she is now naked and that big, ugly, brown bugs are stuck like leeches to her skin. She tries frantically to pull them off her arms, legs, and stomach. She shouts for help, but her mother has drifted out with the tide and her father is nowhere to be seen.

  At four-thirty-five in the morning, Shaffiq boards the twenty-four hour bus that will deliver him to his home, his bed, his sleeping family. Shaffiq counts his blessings that he only has to walk twenty minutes to get to Ossington where an all-night bus passes every fifteen minutes. He feels bad for his co-worker Ravi who has to spend an hour in a coffee shop waiting for the subway to start running each morning.

  There is only one other passenger on the bus, a young disheveled man who sleeps uncomfortably, his head bumping against the cold window whenever the driver presses on the accelerator. Shaffiq passes him, smelling the alcohol reeking from the man’s pores. He mutters a judgmental “chaa” under his breath, guessing that the man is probably on his way home after too much boozing. But then Shaffiq has a moment of sympathy for the man and begins to worry that maybe he will miss his stop, or that he has already slept well past his destination and will awake on the wrong side of town. Shaffiq looks around and notices that they are almost at St. Clair. He has just eight more stops to go and he knows this because counting stops is the only way that he has managed to stay awake on these pre-dawn rides. Should he wake the man? But what if he hasn’t missed his stop and Shaffiq has interfered unnecessarily?

  A block away from his apartment building, Shaffiq rings the bell and the young man stirs. Cautiously, Shaffiq averts his gaze. Men don’t like to be stared at in their sleep. He finds his way to the back door and down the steps of the bu
s.

  His building’s dimly lit lobby is deserted at this hour. He checks the mailbox, hoping for a blue air mail envelope from his ma, but the box is empty and he remembers that Salma already picked up the mail yesterday. He sometimes forgets the many small tasks of the day that pass him by while he sleeps. He taps the elevator “up” button and watches it slowly descend from the eighteenth floor, the indicator lights blinking teasingly at him. He resists an urge to yell “Why is this elevator always stuck at the top floor at five-o-five every morning?” Finally, the doors open and the old elevator carries him upwards, wheezing with the effort. At the fifth floor he steps out, turns right and walks what feels like an eternity to his door. He digs into his pocket for his keys and soundlessly turns the lock. He leaves his coat, shoes, and bag in the small foyer and tiptoes through the quiet apartment to his bedroom. In the dark he slips off his clothes and slithers gently into bed. Despite his slow and careful movements, Salma turns over and says,

  “Hello, Shaffiq.”

  “Go back to sleep, Salma dear.”

  “Wait,” she says groggily, her voice thick with sleep, “first tell me what strange thing you picked up and brought home today.” Then, turning onto her stomach, she resumes her snoring. He strokes her head gently, willing her back to the depths of her dreaming. He scans her round, relaxed body tangled in the sheets. There is a quickening in his groin, a memory of warm pleasures.

  Chapter 2

  BEING A WOMAN ON the verge of burn-out, Nasreen loves Fridays. But it’s not because she enjoys the weekend so much. In fact, she finds the prospect of two days at home in her empty apartment depressing. The real reason Fridays are special to a burn-out case is because there is a one-in-three chance that clients will cancel their appointments. This free time at the end of the week has given Nasreen and her colleagues the opportunity to calculate the odds and sometimes they gather in the hallways as they wait for no-shows and make nickel wagers, betting on whether their two-thirties or three-forty-fives will turn up. They’ve developed conjectures and hypotheses for the phenomenon. Nasreen thinks that the high truancy rate is due to the fact that Fridays are too close to the weekend for the extra burden that therapy demands. Her co-worker, Michael, agrees with her and thinks that all therapists should have Fridays off.

  Nasreen, however, doesn’t mind seeing her own therapist on a Friday afternoon. In fact, Fridays are when she feels most able to let go of other people’s problems and focus on her own life for a change. Not that she has been to therapy for awhile. She checks her calendar and estimates that she has not seen her therapist in over a month. She canceled her last two appointments because she just didn’t feel like going.

  As expected, two of Nasreen’s clients have canceled today. Rather than step out into the hallway to talk with her coworkers, she uses the time to make phone calls. First she dials her supervisor, Wendy Noseworthy, also known as Nosywendy, a woman who gave up her two-decade-long career doing psychotherapy to become an administrator. Nasreen and her colleagues believe that Nosywendy likes to practice her now rusty therapy skills on all the fourth floor therapists during their supervision meetings and has taken a particularly keen interest in Nasreen since her mother died. She has a way of stopping Nasreen in the hallway and enquiring, “So, how are you doing?” the last word always tinged with a kind of desperate longing to be involved in someone else’s emotional life. Nasreen dodges her most days, wanting to avoid any impromptu hallway psychoanalysis.

  But today, Nasreen needs her supervisor to authorize a month-long vacation. She’s decided to go to India with her father as long as she can negotiate two weeks of beach time and tourism for herself. She made the decision that morning when she woke up with a splitting headache. As she attempted to extinguish it with an extra-strength painkiller and a cup of coffee, she visualized herself on a beach in Goa and knew that she should take her father up on his offer.

  She picks up the phone and asks Nosywendy for the time off. Nasreen cites the importance of returning to her long-lost homeland. She adds to her case her recent break-up and the situation of her poor, lonely, widowed father, who really needs her company. In short, she uses all her persuasive powers and Nosywendy readily agrees, as Nasreen predicted. “Go take good care of yourself, I know this has been a difficult time for you. And your father,” she adds. “How have you been doing lately? You’ve had so much loss lately. I’m so sorry about your break-up with Connie. Grief is not an easy thing Nas,” Nosywendy says, with an empathetic sigh.Nasreen feels somewhat charitable towards her supervisor right then, so she offers her just a little more fodder, telling her about how she just completed the Anger Stage in her grieving process. Then, she excuses herself, fibbing about a client who has just arrived.

  Her next phone call is to her father.

  “Dad, I can go on that trip. I just spoke with my boss,” she says, glad to be delivering him some good news.

  “Nasreen you won’t regret this, thank you, thank you! We are going to have a great time!” Nasreen thinks she hears relief in his giddy laughter. They set the date for December third. In just over two months. They will stay four weeks.

  Later that day, Nasreen meets with two non-truant clients. Abby has just moved in with her boyfriend and has been having panic attacks all week. Joyce is a long-time client who thinks it is time to quit therapy. Nasreen catches her mind wandering to India during both sessions. She imagines herself on a Goan beach, the sun soaking deeply into her pores, feels herself breathing in the scent of salt water and suntan lotion. She wonders if she should buy a new bathing suit, if she’s gained too much weight for the one she owns.

  At four o’clock, she writes her note about Joyce, and then checks her day planner. She sees that she is clear for the rest of the afternoon and phones Asha, who picks up on the first ring.

  “House of Lust and Fallen Women, Proprietress Asha speaking.”

  “Hi Ash. Aren’t you ever afraid that it might be your mother calling?”

  “Oh my god. It can’t be Nas. The long-lost stranger is back! No, my mother only ever calls after six or on weekends to traumatize me. She’s the frugal type. How are you doing?”

  “I’m OK. Sorry for not calling for a while. I’ve sort of been hibernating. I guess I’ve been busy too.”

  “Have you heard from Connie lately?”

  “No,” Nasreen says, forcing herself to inhale and then exhale before answering her friend’s query. “I asked her to stop calling me two weeks ago. It’s too hard talking to her.” She fiddles with the gold box on her desk and opens it clumsily with her free hand.

  “I was wondering when you were going to place a moratorium on her. I’m so glad you’re no longer speaking to her. I think this whole thing about lesbians always trying to be best friends with their exes is really messy.”

  “I don’t even know if we’ll end up being acquaintances, let alone best friends.” She rifles through the stack of photos in the box and pulls out the one she has been looking for.

  “Maybe that’s for the best. Good for you for telling her not to call.”

  “Yeah, I think it was a smart thing. I no longer cringe when I hear the phone ringing. She’s been good – she hasn’t called me since I told her not to. That’s one good thing you could say about her, I guess. When she’s gone, she’s really gone.” She studies the photo of herself and Connie, taken on a vacation to New York City.

  “Did I ever tell you that she was no good for you?”

  “A few times.” She scrutinizes herself in the photo. I looked thinner then, she thinks.

  “I guess I’m not the subtle type –”

  “No, not exactly. And I should have listened to you ages ago. But, hey, I didn’t call you to talk about old news.” She replaces the photo in the box and slams it shut. “Here’s something more interesting. I may be crazy, but I agreed to go to India with my Dad. He won a free trip for two.”

  “
Wow, really? I wish I was going somewhere for free. And you know I wish –”

  “That you had my father. Yeah I know.”

  “I’ll trade you mine any day. How’d he win the tickets?”

  “He entered a contest on some Internet site.”

  “For real? That’s amazing. And he’s taking you?”

  “Who else would he take?”

  “He could take me if he wanted.”

  “I should suggest that to him, get myself off the hook. But really, he’s been rather antisocial lately. Most of the time, it’s just him and his computer in that big house. And, of course, he calls me all the time.”

  “You don’t sound very happy to be going.”

  “Well, he’s been so, I don’t know, needy the last while. I hope I have a good time with him. I think I really need a holiday. I mean a real one. Not one taking care of my father.”

  “Poor Bashir Uncle. I guess he must be lonely. But I’m sure the two of you will have a good time. It’ll be a good distraction for you both. I love going to India. Think about all the great shopping and food and…”

  “And meddling Aunties and pollution and poverty. And I don’t speak Gujarati, like you.”