Stealing Nasreen

by Farzana Doctor

  “What’s your feeling about that?”

  “Well, I think so. I think she did like being depressed,” she says, her voice growing stronger, more angry, “It was what she knew how to do. And she knew what to expect from it. She was good at it.”

  “So, depressed was more familiar and easier for her,” Nasreen nods, not wanting to interrupt Miranda’s thoughts.

  “Yeah, and maybe she didn’t want to stop being depressed. It was me and my father and all the doctors who wanted to change her. I suppose we never stopped to find out what she wanted,” Miranda says, blinking hard, as though realizing something for the first time. Nasreen feels a swell of excitement building within herself, and she presses on.

  “How would you have felt if that were true?” Nasreen holds her breath.

  “Then it means that we all drove her to her death,” Miranda says, dropping the Palm Pilot in her lap, her hands traveling up to her face.

  “By wanting her to get well?”

  “By wanting her to be so-called normal. Maybe depression was her normal. Maybe being neurotic and alcoholic is my normal,” she exhales, her hands covering over her eyes, “I never asked her what she wanted. I kept on hoping that she would transform into the mother I wanted and needed.” Miranda rubs her dry eyes, which have started to feel itchy.

  “That seems like a reasonable thing to want,” Nasreen asserts. She looks away from her client, glimpsing a tree branch, almost barren now, most of its leaves already fallen, knock up again the office window.

  “Yeah, I needed a mother. I still do. But now I know I won’t ever get that. At least she did me a favour by not letting me continue with a futile hope,” Nasreen looks back at Miranda, watching her hands grip her electronic organizer, noticing that her face has returned to its previous expressionless state. “Hoping that things would be different was exhausting.”

  After Miranda leaves, Nasreen sits at her desk, staring at the wall for a few moments. The intensity of the session tired her, but it is a good kind of tired, like the fatigue after thirty minutes on an elliptical machine. For the first time in a long time, Nasreen feels like a good therapist instead of a distracted, burn-out case. What she doesn’t know now, what she is yet to sense, is the workout’s hangover. It’s the residue that is about to come, the pain-after-the-gain, the emotional onslaught that arrives a day or so after the endorphin rush.

  She flips open her agenda, scanning the empty pages of her future, wondering when she should see her own therapist again. They didn’t schedule a follow-up appointment after the last session because Nasreen had left her agenda at work. She was supposed to call right after the session to rebook. That was a week ago. She makes the call and leaves a message on Therapist’s voice mail, requesting an appointment.

  Salma stands back from the couch, scrutinizing the painting she has just hung, a little crookedly, on the wall. She studies the raani’s serene face, and notices for the first time that the servant’s gaze is not really averted away from her queen, but directed out at the viewer, at Salma. That’s strange, Salma thinks, why hadn’t I noticed that before? She matches the servant’s stare, appraising her as she feels she is being appraised. Salma imagines the servant standing slightly taller, steadying her posture, her brown nipples pushing against the thin fabric of her blouse. Salma views herself in the painting’s glass reflection, wondering what the servant might see in her. Salma too stands more erect, and brushes her hair back with her fingers. Then she shifts her gaze from her reflection back to the painting beneath and it seems to her that now the raani, too, is glancing her way. The weight of both stares makes Salma inexplicably self-conscious and so she backs away, averting her gaze. She checks to see if the painting is hung level, and out of the corner of her eye thinks that she sees the raani turn and wink at her. She follows the movement with her eyes but once again the raani and her servant have returned to their original positions.

  She hears movement in the next room, the predictable outcome of her recent hammering; her husband is awake. Shaffiq shuffles out, his pajama pants slightly askew, hanging just a little to the left like the painting.

  “Salma, what have you been doing? So much noise –” She knows from his surprised eyes that he has just answered his own question.

  “Well, you know, the wall has been bare for a while, and we kept talking about getting something to put there –”

  “Where did you get this? It’s nice. Reminds me of some of the paintings I used to see back home.” He draws closer to have a better look at it.

  “Yes, I like it. Asima Aunty gave it to me. She and Quaid Uncle bought it last year in India, but had no room for it.”

  “Yes, of course, they bought one too many, as usual?”

  “That’s right,” she says with a laugh, “But let’s not complain, Shaffiq, this apartment is filled with their ‘one too many’ purchases.”

  “That’s true,” he says, moving even closer to the painting, his eyes squinting, “Arré, Salma, this painting is a little naughty, no? Look, when you look at it closely, this woman is half-naked!” Shaffiq, says, pointing and laughing. “Are you sure Asima bought this? It’s almost pornographic! No, it must have been Quaid who picked this up, the old dog!”

  “Pornographic? No, it’s not, Shaffiq! It’s art. And you can hardly see anything, just a little hint of her breast,” Salma says, crossing her arms over her own chest.

  “OK, OK. Don’t get upset. I’m just kidding around. I’m glad we have some Indian art. The wall needed it. Hey, wait a minute is she …” He draws nearer to the painting again, “Just look at the way the raani is looking at her. Salma, she’s looking straight at her nipples!”

  “Maybe it is not the painting, but your own mind that is so dirty.”

  “Arré, it’s so obvious! Just look here, at the line between her eyes and her chest.” He says, pointing, drawing an imaginary line between the raani’s gaze and the servant’s nipples. “Come on, you can’t tell me it’s not obvious!”

  “OK. That’s enough, Shaffiq,” she says, straightening the painting. “I like my raani and her half-naked servant.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” he counters, laughing.

  Chapter 14

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE SALMA snores, Shaffiq roots around in the kitchen for somewhere to hide his most recent treasure. Instinctively, he knows that he will not show this new photo to Salma. It’s not like that other picture he picked out of the wastebasket in the vice-president’s office; that nameless woman had nothing at all to do with Shaffiq’s life. Her photo was only a novelty item, a simple anonymous curiosity. This photo of Nasreen’s is a different matter altogether, something he stalked, hunted, and found in the institute’s garbage bins.

  He hears a noise and looks out into the living room to check if anyone is awake; he thought he heard whispering. He tiptoes to the girls’ room and pauses to watch them sleep. They look so peaceful, he thinks. For a moment, a feeling of calm brushes through him. They will be OK.

  He sneaks back to the kitchen, traversing the dark living room and the agitation returns, and soon he is sweaty from his own nervousness. He looks up at the painting on the wall, notices the raani illuminated by a shaft of moonlight coming in through the drapes. Her image distracts him for a moment, but he knows he must not dally. He has already taken unnecessary risks; he should have hidden the photo last night after his shift, but Salma seemed to be sleeping lightly when he came home. Tonight, she seems dead-asleep. But still, he will have to be quiet.

  He looks through cutlery drawers and underneath piles of coupons and decides that the kitchen is Salma’s domain and probably not a good hiding spot. In fact there is no place in the cramped apartment that is not Salma’s, nor is there any place that is solely his. Even the top drawer of his bureau is shared with her jewellery. He returns to the living room and scans its clutter for a nook or cranny to hold his photo. He examines a sm
all bookshelf that once held encyclopedias in Asima’s home. He touches the Indian knickknacks, running his index finger over a small mirrored elephant that has lost a few of his shiny tiles during the journey to Canada. His mother gave him the little elephant on his sixth birthday – Shireen’s age. Funny how his children have not attempted to play with his treasured elephant.

  On the shelf above, the gold cover of Salma’s Koran beckons to him. He picks it up and holds it, feeling its weight in his hands, dusting off its jacket. He considers hiding the photo within it but changes his mind. He would not want to defile the book with his weird fascination with Nasreen Bastawala.

  Shaffiq is not a very religious man, but he is not a non-believer either. He doesn’t like the structure of it all, the heavy rule-making, the way that some people use religion for their own gain or to pass judgement on others. But he does like the Koran. He admires how some of the passages read like poetry and agrees with the fair-mindedness in most of the prescriptions for daily living.

  He lets the Koran’s binding fall open and it lands in two equal piles at page 246. He scans the page, his eyes slowing to read a passage about adultery. He ponders the words for a moment, then re-reads the passage. Am I a kind of adulterer? He turns the question over in his mind. He has certainly never cheated on Salma, never touched another woman since he married her. And God knows that he barely touched a woman before her, unless you count the smooch from that girl in college and the one adolescent kissing session with his cousin-sister. So it is clear to him that he has never physically cheated on Salma. But why has he been so focused on Nasreen? Why has he been gathering things that belong to her, things that should be of no concern to him at all? He considers his collections: the itinerary, the earring, which he has lost anyway, and now the photo. The first two items landed in his path and it was just his curious nature to pick them up, he rationalizes. Fate brought those things to him. But the photo is different. The photo he procured through more illicit means, behaving like a shameful garbage picker. And for what? So that he could possess this damaged photo? Is this a type of cheating, perhaps an emotional adultery? He doesn’t want Nasreen for romance or sex. That’s not it. He doesn’t see her in that sort of way. It’s something else entirely. It maddens him that he doesn’t know what.

  He turns to look at the raani. “Where shall I put this, what do you think?” Shaffiq examines the painting, gazing at the queen, and in the early morning light, he thinks that he sees her eyebrows rise at him. When he looks over at the servant, he detects her smiling. He shakes his head. Ah, what rubbish. I must be dead tired. But he feels compelled to turn back to the canvas until his eyes begin to ache from the inside out. Finally, the painting releases his eyes and he moves decisively to the kitchen. He slides a top drawer open and feels for the plastic tape dispenser lying sideways behind the knives and spatulas. Back in the living room, he takes the painting down from the wall and turns it over on the couch. In the bottom left hand corner he tapes the photo face down on the cardboard backing. Satisfied that it is secured, he backs away from it and surveys his work. A glint of something shiny catches his eye and he sees what he had not noticed before, a piece of clear plastic attached to the bottom right hand corner of the frame. He hovers above it for a moment, and then tugs at the plastic until it slips out of the frame. Holding his breath, he grasps the delicate package close to his eyes. He unwraps it carefully, knowing that he has just found something that he was not meant to find, aware that he is intruding upon someone else’s secret. Now unwrapped, he sees that between the layers of plastic lies a small silver teardrop. It is his silver earring, the one he found outside Nasreen’s office. The one he lost. Well, really the one that Nasreen lost. His exhausted mind scrutinizes the meaning of this little piece of jewellery hidden behind the painting. His heart pounding, he removes the photo from the frame’s backing, hastily replaces the earring back within its plastic wrap and shoves it into the frame’s edge. He puts the painting back onto the wall and stashes the photo between the pages of a rarely looked-at book about the Life and Times of Mahatma Gandhi. He rushes to bed, falling sideways into a deep sleep, a slumber that grabs him and drags him under before he has a chance to pull the covers around him.

  “Miranda, why don’t you share with me what you wrote this week?”

  Nasreen’s client looks down tentatively at her cream-coloured stationery, and then shuffles the pages, reordering them. She pauses, studies her red canvas shoes and Nasreen notices for the first time today that her usually well-coordinated client looks different. Inside the red shoes are black sport socks, which are topped by a pair of faded blue jeans resting below a crumpled grey silk shirt. Nasreen looks for the usual one-of-a-kind jewellery and tastefully applied make-up and sees none.

  “Sorry, I forgot to make a copy for you again. I’ve been forgetting to do a lot of things this week, actually.”

  “Has something been preoccupying you this week, Miranda?”

  “Well, it’s going to sound really simple, but it has actually been really disturbing …”

  “Yes, go ahead, Miranda,” Nasreen readies herself for Miranda’s words, taking a deep breath, as though preparing herself for a blow. An emotional body-check.

  “Well, I just realized, I mean really realized, that I have no mother and I won’t have one again.”

  “That is a big realization. What’s it feel like?” Nasreen’s insides begin to twist, and at first she wonders if she’s hungry. No, she thinks, I had a big lunch just a couple of hours ago.

  “It feels like I am … empty. Or sort of hollow … right here,” she says, rubbing her flat stomach.

  “Like something is missing?” Nareen says, bringing her own hand to her stomach, empathetically miming Miranda. And that’s when a force within her abdomen brushes up against her fingers, making itself known. A wave of nausea follows and Nasreen, a little alarmed, checks her watch. Reflexively, Miranda checks her own.

  “Listen, can we end early today? I’m not feeling so well. I think I might be coming down with the flu or something,” Miranda says, not hiding her need to bolt the room.

  “OK, Miranda,” Nasreen nods, knowing she is ending the session too easily, but she is relieved. “I’ll see you next week.”

  The next morning, Nasreen takes her journal from her bookshelf and blows a fine coating of dust off its cover. She has not yet done her therapy homework and her appointment with her therapist is tomorrow. She can recognize resistance in her clients and she certainly sees it in herself now. What was the question she was supposed to write about? Patterns. Patterns in relationships. Nasreen’s mind feels as blank as the page in front of her. And something about the session with Miranda is bothering her too, something she is not ready to name. She gets up, puts the kettle to boil and returns to her bed with a cup of orange pekoe.

  The phone rings. Nasreen stares at it a moment and then picks it up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Nasreen, it’s me, your father. I just thought I’d call you today.”

  “Hi Dad. What’s up?”

  “Well, you know what today is, don’t you?” Nasreen hates these types of questions. She gets them from her clients and sometimes her father drops them on her too. They are like not-yet-exploded emotional bombs that she is supposed to detonate. She thinks hard, knowing she has forgotten something.

  “Today? Uh, well, I just got up, I haven’t really looked at the calendar –” Then it comes to her.

  “Nasreen, it is your mother’s birthday today. Didn’t you remember?” She hadn’t. Until just now. Nasreen hears the hurt in her father’s voice.

  “Oh, I guess I wasn’t thinking about it really. And I just woke up. It probably would have come to mind sometime today.” Or this week, or sometime, Nasreen hopes.

  “Well, yes, maybe that is the better way of coping with things. But I can’t help it. I started thinking about her birthday last week,
the way I would have when she was alive. You know, I actually had a moment of panic yesterday when I realized I hadn’t bought her a gift yet. And then I remembered that I didn’t have to.” Bashir’s voice is soft, almost a coarse whisper, “I bought her perfume last year and the year before that too, you know, her favourite kind. It was strange, but I had to buy her gifts even when she was gone. I resolved to not do it this year.” He pauses, and Nasreen is quiet, unsure what she should say, or even if she should interrupt him. He continues, “The bottles are still here in her drawer. Sometimes, I take them out and spray a little of her perfume in the house, just to … just to be able to have something of her here with me.” Nasreen thinks she hears him holding back tears, or maybe they’re the leftovers from tears already cried. She understands now why the smell of her mother still lingers in the house, two years after her death.

  “Geez, Dad, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. Because it made me feel silly, I suppose. And I didn’t want you to feel bad too.”

  “I think it’s normal to remember, Dad. It’s only been a couple of years, right? That’s not a long time when you consider that you lived with her every day for over thirty years.” Nasreen feels her therapist voice emerge and she is suddenly more confident, “You know there have been studies about how bereaved people unconsciously remember significant dates and anniversaries related to the person who died. It’s called the Anniversary Effect.” She wonders why the anniversary effect passed her over this year. But then she remembers the strange feeling in her stomach yesterday during Miranda’s session. Maybe I wasn’t just empathizing.

  “Really? I thought maybe I was just not getting over her death,” Bashir answers, his voice heavy.