Stealing Nasreen

by Farzana Doctor

  “Well, my neighbour and her children are very nice.”

  “Just be careful what kind of influences the children are under. You never know. Anyway. Why don’t we go home and eat? Hopefully my Sherie has fed the kids already.”

  “Yes, it is getting late. We should get back.” Asima’s daughter is not always the most willing babysitter and often forgets details like giving the children dinner.

  “Good. That will give me chance to give you another ridah. I noticed you wear that same one every time,” Asima says, appraising the folded ridah in Salma’s lap, “When we were in India last winter I picked up a few extras. I’ll give you one of those.”

  “Oh, that’s quite alright, Asima Aunty. I mean, I don’t go to the mosque that often. I only really need one. We’re really not that devout.”

  “But if you are going to join me more often you don’t want people to always see you in the same ridah each time, do you?” Asima’s expertly- plucked eyebrows arch quizzically. “Really, it’s no trouble, Salma. I have so many. I’d like to give you one.”

  After dinner, Asima takes Salma upstairs to her walk-in closet and unzips an old plastic blanket bag. She unpacks a selection of ridahs in a variety of colours, most with sequins, bows, and multiple layers of ruffles. Salma chooses a cream-coloured one with just a little lace around the neck.

  “Salma, you’re choosing such a plain one?”

  “Yes, it is more my style than these others,” she says, trying to be diplomatic. Satisfied enough with Salma’s choice, Asima hands Salma the ridah, and turns her attention to folding and packing up the rest into the zippered blanket bag. Meanwhile, Salma looks around the bedroom, enviously noticing the matching oak furniture, the armoire, dresser, bed, and side tables. Asima bought this set to replace the older one she gave to Salma when they first arrived in Canada. A colourful painting hanging above Asima’s bed catches Salma’s eye.

  “Asima is that new? It’s so beautiful,” Salma says, admiring the painting of an ancient raja surrounded by his servants.

  “Yes, Quaid bought it during our last trip. I think that’s his ultimate fantasy. He’d like to be a king in his court, you know?” she scoffs.

  “Good thing you keep him in line, Asima Aunty.” Salma says, joking back.

  “You know, if you’d like, we have another one sort of like this in the basement. It’s not as pretty, but still nice. As usual, we bought too much in India and we don’t really have any space left for it all.”

  “Really? We could use a bit more decoration in our place. It’s a shame that we couldn’t bring some of our nice things from India. I never thought I would miss that stuff when I was packing up.”

  “It’s only when you leave India that you realize how much you long for it. Perhaps Quaid and I will retire there one day,” she says wistfully. “But take the painting. Quaid won’t mind. He won’t even notice that it is gone. Come, let’s go downstairs and see what the children are up to.”

  Later, Asima directs Salma to the painting in storage downstairs. She descends the steps to the cool basement, where there is enough furniture, old clothing and food to fill a second house. She pauses to look at the clutter: the labeled, green garbage bags filled for charity; the shelves of boxed and canned goods lining the walls; the useless possessions. She wonders, is this what living in Canada does to a person: causing one to buy and collect so many things that a large basement is required to store everything? She wonders if she, too, will become a hoarder one day.

  Salma easily finds the painting beside the stairwell. She clicks on a nearby light and studies it carefully. A raani reclines on a dais. She is on some kind of terrace overlooking well-manicured gardens and there is a blue lake or pond off in the distance. She wears a regal blue sari trimmed in gold. Her blouse is red and encircling her neck are multiple bands of gold. She has smooth, unblemished skin and thick black hair befitting a queen. Salma can’t quite make out if she is old or young, but there is something about her expression that makes her appear arrogant, or perhaps shrewd. She drinks from a small gold goblet and not far from her stands a young female servant, waiting to refill her cup. The servant is also beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the queen, but her eyes are slightly averted to demonstrate submission to her mistress. She wears a gauzy green blouse. The queen gazes at the servant, smiling indulgently. Salma smiles to herself, feeling as though she has found hidden treasure. She grips the painting’s edges tightly, not wanting to smear the glass with her fingers, and carefully carries it upstairs.

  “Ah, you found it. How do you like it?”

  “It’s lovely, Aunty Asima. The colours are so rich. Are you sure that Quaid won’t want to keep it? It almost looks like it should go with the one upstairs. Shouldn’t the raja have his raani?”

  “That’s what Quaid said too. But the wall is not big enough for them both and I prefer the other one. Keep it,” she says, looking for a bag large enough to contain it, “I’ll have Sherie drop you and the children at the subway.” She encases the painting in a heavy-duty green garbage bag and hands it back to Salma.

  At home, after she had tucked the girls in for the night, Salma searched the kitchen drawers looking for picture hooks large enough for the new painting. Of course, there weren’t any to be found, for the Paperwalas didn’t have any artwork or wallhangings that would require such hardware. Sighing, she placed the painting at the back of the closet, taking care to stand it at an angle so that it would not fall over and be damaged when one of her children went looking for a pair of chappals or boots. She wanted to keep her new painting safe.

  Chapter 6

  BY MONDAY AFTERNOON, SHAFFIQ feels somewhat rested. Two days of sleeping in darkness, playing dolls with Shireen, talking to Saleema about fantasy book plots, and lying on the couch with Salma, leave him feeling almost ready to return to work. He heads to the Institute early again to cover for Ravi, who is still sick. Shaffiq considers calling Ravi at home, to check on his bachelor friend, but decides to wait until tomorrow. At five o’clock he is in the elevator, on his way to the fourth floor. James, his supervisor, approaches in the hallway. He is younger than Shaffiq, and maybe better looking, with a confident walk. Shaffiq eyes his supervisor’s bulging biceps enviously as he approaches and ponders the fact that he has never had a single bulging muscle in his life.

  “Shaffiq,” James pronounces his name so it rhymes with ‘reek’, all the soft lilting nuances disappearing from it, “thanks for covering Ravi. Just do what you can with his areas; I don’t expect you to spend as much time there as you do your own floors. Clean up any visible messes and the garbage and recycling. Ravi can do the rest when he’s back.”

  “Thanks. That will save me some time. Tonight at least.” Why didn’t he tell me that last week, Shaffiq grumbles to himself. Missing the tenor of his employee’s gripe, James beams a happy grin Shaffiq’s way.

  “And speaking of saving time, we just got in a brand new machine for cleaning the floors. Top of the line. You’ll need to be trained on it. Come see me at the beginning of your shift tomorrow and I’ll walk you through it.”

  “OK then, I’ll see you tomorrow. A new machine, how great!” Shaffiq tries to sound chipper and allows a wide smile to overtake his face, hoping that he is not overdoing it. He would not want the man to think he was mocking him. James returns the smile and Shaffiq watches him stroll down the hallway, stopping once to inspect something on the floor. He watches James rub away the offending mark with his fingernail and then walk on. How lucky the man is, so at home in this place, Shaffiq thinks. This latest cleaning machine is probably like a new toy for him.

  James reminds Shaffiq of Ashok, his supervisor in Bombay. Ashok was a middle manager in the Government of Maharashtra, a young lackey with no real power but desperately content to take whatever scraps of authority he was given. He started at Shaffiq’s division more than six years after Shaffiq, but advanced much faster up
the civil service ladder even with his obvious lack of accounting aptitude. Shaffiq’s progess was much more difficult, full of broken rungs and slippery steps. When he complained bitterly to his friends and Salma about his young boss, they commiserated that the government was no place for a Muslim, and that there would be few new prospects for him there.

  Shaffiq upends a blue recycling box into a clear plastic bag. He watches the white pages fall, forming haphazard piles at the bottom. Then he empties another bin, and then another until the bag is full, and ready to be cinched and taken to the basement. As he lifts the bag onto his cart, he glimpses something familiar through the plastic, a translucent window into his past. Heart pounding, he retrieves the paper, flattens out its creases, his accountant’s mind recognizing the tidy horizontal and vertical lines of the crumpled budget sheet. Scanning the columns agitatedly, he discerns that there is a significant error in the calculations: the actuals are three percent over budgeted estimates.

  “What are you doing?” The voice is cautious, but stern. Shaffiq turns to the woman in the business suit standing behind him, looking at him warily.

  “Sorry, I was just noticing this as I emptied your recycling bin.” Shaffiq is not used to interacting with the people he cleans up after. He holds his breath, and thinks of something to say, “I couldn’t help myself, you see there is a calculation error here that overestimates the deficit significantly and –”

  “What, there is?” she says, looking confused, taking the page and scanning the line his fingertip is pointing to. Shaffiq takes a moment to study the crows’ feet around her grey eyes, the wisps of red hair escaping from her hair clip. “Oh, I see. On this line,” she says.

  “I’m sorry if I was looking at something I shouldn’t have.”

  “Yes, these are confidential budget sheets. I’m not sure that cleaning staff should be scrutinizing them.”

  “You see I am not really a janitor. Well I am here, but back in Bombay I did this kind of thing in my job –”

  “Oh, well, I suppose I should thank you for noticing my mistake. But please, for future reference, you really shouldn’t be –” She frowns, not able to hide her irritation.

  “You see I am an accountant,” Shaffiq adds, wanting her to understand. “That’s what I really am. I guess my eyes were just drawn to what used to be so familiar to me.”

  “I see,” she says, with a frozen smile that tells Shaffiq that she doesn’t, that it would take a leap of understanding to see beyond his janitor’s uniform, and listen beyond his Bombayite accent. She takes the paper from his hands and walks across the hall to her office, closing the door firmly behind her.

  He wouldn’t have wanted to take the spreadsheet home with him anyway.

  Miranda is back in Nasreen’s office for her second appointment. Her short, ice-blond hair, clutched into a tight ponytail, stretches her forehead back, making her look wide-eyed to Nasreen. She sits forward in her chair, her crisp black trousered legs crossed over and around themselves in a half slip knot, in a manner that only really skinny women can manage. She holds a typewritten list of questions in front of her and is advancing through them while Nasreen follows along, holding an identical sheet on her lap. Nasreen fingers the expensive stationery, her eyes moving back and forth between its contents and Miranda’s pointed expression. In the preceding twenty-five minutes, they have run through half of the questions already. Nasreen’s interpretations of them so far are: do you think I’m nuts; how exactly are you going to help me; and are you really qualified to do this job, because I’m not really so sure of it, you look so young. Nasreen has come to expect these kinds of questions from her more assertive clients and is quite good at hearing the fear flowing beneath the words; after a few years on the job, she no longer takes the questions personally. She almost expected them from Miranda, and here they are, arriving promptly at session two.

  “Would you mind if I interrupted you here? I have something I wanted to ask you.” Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thinks Nasreen. A tingly sensation moves through her now, the electricity of clarity, intuition. She is on her game today, undistracted, and focused for a change.

  “Fine,” Miranda says, a hint of irritation in her voice.

  “Many of my clients take some time to trust me and themselves in this therapy process, which is very normal. Are you worried that you cannot trust what is going to happen here?” Nasreen asks, trying to regain control of the session.

  “Trust, how do you mean?” Miranda tucks some mutinous stray blond hairs behind her ear.

  “Well, it could be a mistrust of both what could happen and what may not happen,” Nasreen says in her best Therapist voice. Miranda continues to look confused, and chews on the edge of her thumb. Nasreen notices a torn nail and cuticle. “Therapy is about exploring who you are and why you behave in the ways that you do. It is also about trying to create changes that are important to you. The answers you come up with can be interesting or upsetting or exciting, or scary or all of those feelings put together.” Nasreen adds. She is almost enjoying herself.

  “My last therapy experience was definitely not trustworthy,” Miranda laughs nervously. “Some of my worst fears about myself were brought to light. I think I came here to try to disprove all of that.” She picks up the strap on her briefcase, winds it first around her thumb and then her wrist.

  “Do you mean that you have a problem with alcohol?” Nasreen straightens in her seat. She feels herself readying for something.

  “Not exactly. I know I have a problem with alcohol,” she says defensively. “What I suppose I have to talk about is my mother. I think she’s the reason for the drinking. You must hear a lot of that here. Doesn’t everyone blame their mothers for everything?” she says, with a sarcastic tone.

  Nasreen watches as the leather strap cuts off the blood in Miranda’s hand. “So what can you predict will happen for you if you start talking about her?” she asks, her tone gentler now.

  “I’ll want to leave.” She releases the strap and looks down, surprised at the red welts left on her pale wrist. “And I’ll want to blame you. I’ll want to believe that you are the wrong therapist for me. Too young, not understanding enough, too different,” Miranda coughs, “you know, from a different culture, all that. I’ve used that excuse before you know.” Nasreen nods at the familiar sentiment.

  “So what are we going to do about that?” Nasreen sits back in her chair. “How can we keep track of all of that so that it doesn’t interfere with what you need to do here?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to try trusting you,” Miranda mutters while watching Nasreen’s face carefully.

  “Take your time with that. And yourself? Will you need to trust yourself?”

  “And myself.” A stream of hot breath leaks out of Miranda’s mouth and rushes at Nasreen, rustling the stationery in her hand. Nasreen looks down at the typewritten words, hoping Miranda will come back for her next session.

  Nasreen had never thought she’d become a psychologist, didn’t even know what one was until she reached university and took a first year elective that piqued her interest. If you’d asked her what she wanted to be when she was a child, she would have told you that she would be a dancer. Perhaps like so many children who grew up watching too much television, she held in high esteem entertainers of all kinds. From the age of eight, she took a number of classes: tap and jazz, guitar, singing, ballet, drama. There was a different class for every season, and by the time the weather changed, she became disappointed and bored with each one. In the spring of her ninth year, her mother enrolled her in a ballet class to help her to develop more grace, and Nasreen soon decided that it was her favourite dance form despite its toe-crunching moves. By the summer, she was thoroughly fascinated with, and religious about, her twice-a-week classes. She loved the pink tights and satin shoes and hoped to one day to wear a stiff tutu and skirt like the older dancers who performed on televisi
on at Christmastime. She also loved her teacher, Miss Harlingen, who was thin and tall and wore her platinum blond hair in a tight bun pinned high on her head, like a small crown. She was the prettiest woman Nasreen had ever seen in all of her nine years. Even prettier than her mother.

  Her parents encouraged her to continue taking the classes because they sensed her obvious pleasure and like other parents of only-children, they very much wanted to make their daughter happy. They dropped her off and picked her up each Monday and Thursday, sometimes staying to watch the class behind a window from the hallway. They complimented her on her pliés and pointes. They bought expensive seats at performances in Toronto and gifted her with books and posters about Karen Kain. But they drew the line when Nasreen confessed her dream of being a professional dancer; they made it clear to her that this would not be a good career path for her, not a serious endeavour, but a nice hobby. They suggested that a girl like her could be anything she wanted in this day and age. She could be a doctor or lawyer or the Prime Minister. But Nasreen knew they were wrong. She would be a dancer, even if they didn’t think that she could. She would keep trying, working harder, and eventually she would dance in a theatre like the girls in the Nutcracker. She’d show them. She dreamed of going to the special ballet school in Toronto that Miss Harlingen talked about. She adopted the toe-to-heel walk of ballet stars and in each class she watched for her teacher’s approval, tried harder to match her steps with the others.

  It didn’t work. In time, she came to understand that she was not the class favourite. She frowned when her teacher told her to hold in her stomach and patted her round rump in an attempt to straighten her stance. Nasreen knew that Miss Harlingen only did that to the plump girls. She never gave these instructions to the skinny dancers who she placed in the front row of the hall.

  One day, at the end of the spring that marked Nasreen’s second year of classes with Miss Harlingen, the top eight students were chosen to perform in the end-of-year recital. Nasreen waited, holding her breath, her stomach held in and her buttocks clenched as she stood as tall as she could, while one by one the names of other students were announced. She concentrated on Miss Harlingen’s voice, trying to get noticed. Surely there was some mistake. Miss Harlingen smiled at the remaining three girls and told them to try again next year. Nasreen looked over to the parents’ window to see if her mother had witnessed her humiliation but she hadn’t, being too short to see past the small group of mothers crowded around the window. Nasreen stepped off the dance floor, toe-to-heel, toe-to-heel, and told her mother that she had a stomach-ache and wanted to go home.