Stealing Nasreen

by Farzana Doctor

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s too late for privacy, Shaffiq. And what Nas says is right. She is in this too and you should hear her side of things also. I’m tired of the lies. Yes, Asha, good idea. You can mediate. Go ahead.”

  “You OK with this too, Nas?”

  “Yeah, why not. Things can’t get any stranger, can they?”

  “Good! But first, I think we need to all sit down and have some tea. Shaffiq, please go into the kitchen and put on the kettle,” Asha instructs Shaffiq. He obediently retreats to the kitchen where, with trembling hands, he boils water, chooses four fancy-guest-only cups from the cupboard, and steeps four bags of Red Rose in Salma’s favourite teapot.

  Chapter 27

  MINUTES LATER, THE TEA is poured and Salma, Nasreen, and Shaffiq sit on the couch across from Asha, who is seated in a vinyl-covered chair pulled in from the kitchen. The painting of the raani and her servant is returned to its rightful place on the wall. Salma’s eyes travel up to it and she imagines they are presiding over the proceedings, perhaps making their own judgements. Shaffiq, too, looks up at the painting and thinks he sees the raani’s smile turn smug.

  Starting from the left and working right, Asha listens to each unique point of view, periodically shushing someone who tries to interrupt, challenge or contradict the other. She takes meticulous notes in her spiral bound Gujarati notebook. When each couch-defendant has had their turn, Asha says, “Now I will summarize what each of you has just shared. Again, no interrupting!” She glares at the Paperwalas. “First, we’ll start with you, Salma.” All eyes turn toward Salma, who shifts an inch or two to the edge of the couch, away from Nasreen.

  “Why me first? Didn’t all of this start with Shaffiq?”

  “Let’s just move left to right. Everyone OK with that?” Asha doesn’t wait for them to answer. “Salma. You’ve admitted to having a crush on Nasreen. But, you believe it was really not about Nasreen exactly, but some kind of internal struggle you were having with yourself about a relationship from your past. Yeah, right! As though things work like that!”

  Salma flashes her a look of exasperation. “I didn’t call it a crush, Asha. Those are your words. I said an attraction. And I repeat, it was somewhat confused with my memories about Raj.”

  “Clarification noted. Whatever.” Asha consults her notes. “Anyway, you began to feel a bit jealous that Shaffiq had been bringing home items you were able to deduce belonged to Nas. Your crush also resulted in you losing control one day, and you kissed Nas out of the blue at a Gujarati class. I might add, for your benefit, Shaffiq,” she says, turning to him, “that I was sick in bed that day and was not a witness to the kiss.” She turns back to Salma to complete her monologue, “You deliberately chose not to tell Shaffiq about that day or the subsequent meeting you had with Nas at the coffee shop where the two of you talked about the kiss.” Her audience shifts uncomfortably: Salma looks at the floor, Nasreen holds her head in her hands, and Shaffiq stares off into space.

  Asha reviews her notes, and then her demeanour softens.

  “Oh yes. You’ve also been very homesick and lonely here. Is that right?” Salma nods, looking down into her lap, and Shaffiq leans behind Nasreen to touch his wife’s shoulder. Asha continues, “Gosh I’m good at this, eh, Nas? I should be a therapist too, huh?”

  “Let’s continue, Asha,” Nasreen says impatiently.

  “All right, already. OK, now moving to you, Nas. No, I think we should jump to Shaffiq.” He opens his mouth to protest and Asha holds up her palm to silence him. “Nas has had the smallest role in this mess, and has really ended up, literally and figuratively, in between the two of you. I’ve changed my mind and so I’m doing her summary last,” she says definitively.

  “You are her friend and more than a little biased,” says Shaffiq, pushing himself up and off the couch.

  “Sit down, Shaffiq. Let’s finish this thing. I’m not the only one who is going to be subjected to this,” orders Salma. After a moment of him standing, arms crossed over his chest with the three women staring at him, he eventually complies and takes his seat again.

  “You admit that you’ve had a strange interest in Nas all along, but you say it’s not sexual or romantic. Like Salma, you want us to believe that Nas represents something bigger than that to you. Your theory is that as the child of immigrants, she represents something about settling in Canada? You have a list of worries. Worry Numero Uno: you did the wrong thing by bringing your family here. Worry Number Two: will your family ever be as at home here as in Bombay? Finally, Worry Number Three: will your children turn out to be as westernized as Nas? Is that it?” She pauses until he looks up and grudgingly nods.

  “That’s quite a simplistic summary of my worries, but I suppose you got the gist of it,” Shaffiq admits.

  “You know, your daughters could do worse than end up being like me!” Nasreen grumbles.

  “I didn’t mean it like that!” Shaffiq says.

  “Yeah. But you know, Nas, I didn’t believe him before, but now his theory is sort of making sense,” Asha responds pensively. “I read something about this kind of thing once. I don’t think it’s personal. It is more like you embody what is so familiar and foreign at the same time to him, you know?”

  “Hello, hello! Can we get back to what we were talking about?” says Salma.

  “Yes, you haven’t finished my summary,” Shaffiq complains.

  “Sorry, I digress. I just find this so interesting. There’s a dissertation topic in this. Anyway. Now, the itinerary, you said you picked that up innocently, because you were feeling homesick. At the same time you knew it was Nas’s and you didn’t tell your wife that. You say that it was not relevant at the time. The earring you found, you thought might be Nas’s but you weren’t sure. But when you lost it, then later found it hidden behind that,” she says, pointing to the painting above them, “and you heard from Salma that she had a student with the same name, you figured it out. So it wasn’t quite a coincidence, then, but you maintain that it was all innocent. You knew that both you and Salma were in contact with Nas, but you didn’t reveal that you’d met her, as didn’t Salma. You both kept that a secret,” she says, looking accusingly at Salma. Then she turns back to Shaffiq.

  “This secret seemed to build on itself, didn’t it? Then, you overheard the half of the conversation between Nas and Salma when you were skulking around outside her office.” She holds her hand up again to silence his protests. “Come on, Shaffiq, you admitted to being a bit of a nosey man. You are actually a little bit of a stalker. You could have walked away when you heard her on the phone, but you didn’t, and so you overheard the call and began to wonder what your wife was up to with Nas here. Did I get that right?”

  “I am not a stalker!” He turns to Salma, “But really Salma, this has blown up into something huge. A mountain out of an ant hill. I would forgive you for kissing her, I think, if you’d told me when it happened … I mean … ,” he blusters, trying to think of the right words, “I mean, I don’t blame you, in fact. It’s obvious, at least now, anyway, that you are susceptible to the influences of women who are like that and after all, she’s a very pretty girl, not that I think of her in that way –”

  “Shaffiq, you’d better stop while you’re ahead. And by the way, you might as well accept that Salma here has her own role in being attracted to women. She’s probably a lesbian too, for all we know,” says Asha.

  “What? No! I’ll have you know my Salma is not a lesbian!”

  “Does having two attractions to women in my lifetime make me a lesbian? Maybe it does, I don’t know. But I do love my husband. I’m not sure what any of this means.”

  “Asha, move along please. I don’t think we need to define anybody’s sexual orientation tonight,” Nasreen says tiredly.

  “All right, let’s move to your side of the story, then. You’ve just come out of a break-up and have been dealing wi
th some heartbreak there. When you began to sense that Salma might have crushy feelings for you, which by the way, I told you so!” She looks at Salma, “I could tell from that very first class!” She spots Salma’s look of ire and continues, “you didn’t do anything to dissuade her because, face it, Nas, it was good for your ego after what Connie did to you.”

  “Who’s Connie?” Salma asks.

  “Her lying, cheating, good for nothing ex-girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” Shaffiq says quietly.

  “Anyway, do I have your story right, Nas?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And then we come to the night of the kiss. You did pull away from Salma and realized that things had gone too far. You later called her because you thought it was a good idea to talk about the kiss, or ‘process its meanings’, as you called it. You both decided to put it all behind you and continue with the Guju classes, which is why we’re here tonight. Oh, and yes, you never knew that Shaffiq was married to Salma until the night of the kiss.” She takes a breath. “So, that summarizes everyone’s part in this whole deal. Did I miss anything important? Anything anyone wants to add at this point?”

  “No, I think you got it all, sort of, in all its complete full craziness, Ash.” Nasreen concedes.

  Salma looks at the ceiling. Shaffiq shrugs. Asha continues, “Good. Here is what I suggest then –

  “Wait,” Shaffiq says, rising from the couch, “There’s just one thing more. I might be stupid for doing this, but I don’t want to ignore this detail.” He walks toward the shelf holding the Gandhi book and the photo of Nasreen and the scribbled out woman he retrieved from the Institute’s trash bins. I just want to –”

  He is interrupted by a cellphone ringing the medley to Let it Be. All eyes turn to Nasreen’s singing purse. She rifles through it and after a moment, answers the phone.

  “Hello? What? Omigod … Oh no. Where is he? I’ll be right there, thanks.”

  “Who was it, Nas? What’s wrong?” asks Salma.

  “I have to go. My father is at Mississauga General.” Nasreen hastily gathers her belongings together.

  “What! Su tayuu?” Shaffiq says, turning away from the couch.

  “He had a heart attack.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Asha says without hesitation. The two students pull on their coats and Salma and Shaffiq see them to the door.

  “Kuddafiz,” murmurs Shaffiq, wishing them to go into the company of God. Nasreen hears him and turns to acknowledge the farewell while Asha pulls her into the waiting elevator.

  “Now what?” asks Salma, sitting heavily on the brown couch.

  “Well, I guess it depends on how serious the heart attack was. It is good he’s at the hospital. Hopefully he got help in time.”

  “Yes, let’s hope so. But that’s not what I meant. I meant about us. This evening. All that was said.”

  “Well, I think I have to find another job. I am obviously so bored there that I have become too involved in my detective-hobby. It ultimately went a little too far,” Shaffiq says, joining Salma on the couch.

  “Come on, that’s not what I was talking about. I never knew that you had mixed feelings about being here, Shaffiq. You never shared your doubts with me, your doubts about us making our home here, about the girls growing up here. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “How could I? I pressured you into moving. You haven’t been happy from the beginning. I know that. Look what you sacrificed to come here. The most important thing in your life when we first met was your teaching. I took that away from you. I had to try to make things right here. The very least I could do was be positive. I had to be the one who was hopeful,” he says, his eyes hesitantly probing hers.

  “I don’t need you to be hopeful. I need you to be honest with me. I need to know that we are together in this.”

  “Are we? What about those crushes? What about what’s her name, Raj, is it?” Salma nods. “Are you still in love with her? Do you really want to be with me, or are you like Nas and Asha?”

  “We are –” She takes his hand, “we are together, Shaffiq.” She inhales deeply, “And I don’t know if I am like those two, Asha and Nas. I suppose in some ways I am, otherwise I would not have loved Raj, or had that little attraction to Nas. But I do love you. The rest I don’t know right now.” He searches her face, trying to understand her words.

  “OK,” he says, tiredly, not sure what else to say. His mind and eyes wander back to the Gandhi book still on the shelf hiding the photo.

  “I’m relieved that you and I could finally be honest with each other. We haven’t talked properly in a long time.”

  “Yes, you are right. Maybe we just need to spend more time together.” He guiltily turns his attention away from his hidden treasure.

  “Maybe that’s what it is,” she says, noncommittally.

  Shaffiq strokes her cheek and guides her face to his, kissing her softly, cautiously. After a moment, she pulls away, distracted by the raani. Shaffiq follows her eyes.

  “This painting, it kind of tricks the eye, don’t you think?” she says.

  “Yes, have you noticed that sometimes it seems the raani’s expression appears to change? Sometimes when I’ve looked at her for a long time, it is like her eyes get smaller or bigger, or her mouth turns up or down.”

  “And sometimes that half-naked servant also does it. It’s got to be some kind of optical illusion, or maybe it’s our imagination.”

  “Or our own insanity,” Shaffiq says, laughing nervously and looking up at the raani.“Well,” Shaffiq says, “I meant to tell you about that. But, I kind of like the painting now. It’s grown on me.”

  Chapter 28

  “YOU GO AHEAD, NAS. I’ll park and then come and find you.”

  Nasreen slams the car door, runs up the sidewalk, and steps inside the automatic revolving door. It moves slowly and she pushes against the glass pane in a futile attempt to hurry it. Once inside, she rushes past the coffee vendor and restaurants to the information kiosk. She gives her father’s name to a bored looking receptionist. After what feels like an interminable wait, the woman provides Nasreen with directions to the Emergency Department.

  “Wait, hold on just a minute, honey. Looks like he’s been moved to the Cardiac Care unit on the second floor. Room 212,” she says, and Nasreen hurries away without thanking her. She stands at the bank of elevators, anxiously pressing the button several times. Cursing under her breath, she sees a stairwell and decides to jog up the stairs, taking them two at a time. After asking for directions once more, she finds her father’s silent room.

  Inside, Bashir lies sleeping, a myriad of tubes connecting his nose to oxygen, his bruised arm to a slow dripping clear liquid, and his wrist to a softly beeping monitor. She moves to his side and sits on the hard plastic chair beside the bed, watching him sleep. She ineffectually tries to decipher the red flickering lights on the monitor. There is movement under his closed eyelids, his eyes roving jerkily in his sleep. She wishes that she had some lip balm to rub on his parched lips.

  She takes his cool dry hand gingerly in hers and waits. She waits for him to stir or wake, or show some sign of life. She studies his still figure, his appearance of vulnerability. She can’t stand this reversal of roles, the way she is instantaneously shifted into the stronger one, the one watching over. She felt the same way during her mother’s illness. Then, she resisted being her mother’s caregiver, avoiding as much as possible the embarrassing moments of feeding, bathing, and dressing. Her father didn’t seem to mind the role, which he seemed to grow into so naturally. She tries not to think about what it might have been like for him to change her mother’s diaper, a husband becoming a nursemaid.

  She inhales the hospital room’s odour of disease and dying and hopes that it is not her father giving off that smell but the institution’s cleaning solutions, or the wheezing man in the next bed ove
r from her father. She leans close to her father, sniffs his neck near where a thick artery pulses listlessly. There is a faint odor of rubbing alcohol, but that is all. She sighs in relief. Death is not coating his skin yet.

  She turns her attention to the room, surveying the bare whiteness of its walls. This place is much too familiar to her, reminding her of her mother’s old room three floors up from here, in the Oncology unit. Zainab’s sick room had an ironic cheer to it, the result of her father’s ministrations, his attempts to infuse hope into her mother’s three-month hospital stay. Vases of roses and lilies crowded every available surface and Nasreen soon started distributing the overflow to other patients on the floor.

  Nasreen now wonders how many hours her father has been here, alone, before someone called her. Her eyes well with tears as she realizes that no one else would know about his heart attack. She is his emergency contact. His next of kin. She will have to call his friends if any are to come. She begins a mental list of who to call first, remembering the friends who visited her mother, those people who looked at her, and him, with pitying eyes.

  “Dad, I’m here,” she whispers. She thinks she sees his eyelids flutter, acknowledging her words.

  “Nas, how is he?” Asha walks in, her eyes scanning Bashir, “Is he going to be OK?”

  “I don’t know yet. I haven’t had a chance to ask. I haven’t even seen a nurse since I arrived.”

  “It’s these damn cut-backs, you know. The staff are probably too busy. I’ll go see if I can find someone.”

  “Yeah, can you go get a nurse? Oh, and I need you to make some calls for me too.”

  “No problem. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Later, after visiting hours are over, Nasreen sits with her father through the night, her mind aimlessly shifting between her father, right here, right now, lying in his hospital bed, and the memories pulling her three floors up, and two years into the past, back to her mother.