Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  I couldn’t bring myself to respond in kind, and she shifted away to inspect the pot on the stove, the awkwardness she felt as a result noticeable only to me, I believe. She stirred the sauce, the sweetness of the onions and garlic, the tartness of the as yet uncooked tomatoes rising from the skillet, and under her breath asked if I was sure there was enough for us all. I nudged her aside and told her I knew what I was doing, to let me do my job. It has been a long-standing irritation between us that she is forever telling me what I’ve done wrong or how this or that should be, or should have been done, and so this back and forth between us is rote, and could just then have easily been construed as a kind of usual play.

  It’s your pot,” she conceded. “Carry on, then. I’m sure it’ll be good.”

  Prakash laughed and said he’s just like me, that when he is in the kitchen he doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do.

  Being with the two of them in the same room, seeing them together, suddenly had a new effect on me. I felt, for the first time, that it was good that he was here at this particular time. What was to be would be, and his presence here was probably, in the end, all for the good.

  Forever conscious of what others are thinking and feeling, Priya announced in a suddenly bold voice that the aroma of the sauce was the most pleasant we’d had in the kitchen in weeks, a preamble to asking her friend if he’d as yet gotten a whiff of the dead mouse. He brushed off the question, saying that while he was not colour-blind, he had no sense of smell. On the heels of that, pointing to my pot, he exclaimed, “She’s cooking for me.”

  He appeared to be an affectionate man, and when Priya responded, “Fancy that!” she seemed to me, in contrast and despite the attempt to keep smiling, churlish, and I couldn’t tell if this had something to do with him, or if it was about her and me.

  He engaged me, saying, “No, really, she said so. She told me she doesn’t usually cook. So this one’s for me, and it’s vegetarian, too.”

  And I found myself pulled along — against my will or not, I couldn’t tell — or should I say siding? — with him, this man I’d only just met. “Yes, that’s right. It’s for him,” I chimed in.

  I had not been able to confidently hold my own earlier when Skye was in the kitchen here with us. I’d felt as if I were struggling to be myself in the face of too many lies, and resorted to speaking at unusual length about Lorenzo Valla’s motives for debunking the veracity of the Donation of Constantine I. But — here, now — I was less agitated in front of this man. He was a buffer between Priya and me, slowing our tearing at each other.

  Unaware of the role he’d played in our lives these past weeks, and more so now, he followed Priya with his eyes watery, a pleased broad smile on his face.

  My reserve irked Priya. I could tell her mind was more on me than on him. She turned her back to us with a hand on each of the handles of the fridge and pulled open both French doors. For many seconds she stood there, the interior light brightening her face and torso. Whatever had happened to us? Perhaps it is more common than not that things break down in slow motion rather than with a single grand gesture, and you can get so inured by the slow demise, even as it happens and happens and happens right before your eyes, that you don’t notice the approach of the point of no return.

  As if her reason for having gone to the fridge suddenly occurred to her, she asked if either of us needed a drink or something to nibble on, and her friend pointed to the cup of tea on the counter and said, “I’ve already been well taken care of.”

  He wouldn’t take his eyes off Priya, nor for a long time did the smile on his lips fade. I can’t say if my reading of him was accurate, but his expression wasn’t simple delight at being in the same room with her. It was more as if he were a parent looking with amazement at what had become of the child he’d brought up. This was ridiculous, of course, because they were only a year apart in age, and I’ve never known Priya to accept being treated by anyone — including her parents — like a child.

  Removing her jacket from the stool, she excused herself to go hang it up and change into house shoes. But she was gone for longer than these little tasks would have taken. Prakash was saying something about being a vegetarian, but my mind was on Priya. I wondered how long it would be before she left with him to show him around the area. I needed time alone but I didn’t want to show agitation over not knowing when they’d leave.

  “They amaze me,” he said, and I realized he was speaking of his children. “When they were very young — five, six, seven years of age — they knew all their friends from school went to fast-food restaurants at the mall and they used to be invited to other kids’ birthday parties where there’d be hot dogs and that sort of thing. I didn’t have to tell them they couldn’t eat this or that, they just saw what we did and didn’t ourselves do, and on their own they put two and two together and acted accordingly. As far as I know, they never gave in to any temptations.”

  I nodded, but I had to wonder, what kind of young kid wouldn’t want to try a hot dog — especially if everyone around was having one and their own parents weren’t watching? Did they really not take even a tiny taste, or was he a doting father, a gullible man who believed his children were infallible when, here and there, now and then, they were in fact nibbling forbidden fruit behind his back? There are probably things about his children he doesn’t know. I was about to put the idea in his head, but thought quickly better of it, as a small incivility could unnecessarily escalate out of control.

  There was a bit of a ruckus coming from the front of the house — sounded like Priya was cleaning up the foyer, sorting through shoes and boots — and from the clanging of the hangers in the cupboard, I guessed she was rearranging coats and jackets.

  “And then, one day — and I don’t know what precipitated it, but it was out of the blue — they were asking: why do other people eat those kinds of things and we don’t?”

  With a finger held up in the air, I interrupted him and called out, asking Priya what she was doing. She said, in a voice I know well, that she was making room for her jacket and Prakash’s. She was telling me, I suppose, that I could have hung his jacket instead of throwing it on the couch in the living room. I called back to her to leave those things and come and hang out with us — my own wording to suggest to her and to him, in a semi-playful way, that she was not being hospitable. He didn’t seem to notice her admonishing tone or my playful snarkiness; he just carried on.

  “I explained to them about different cultures,” he said, “about how a person’s culture makes him or her special. In our culture, I explained, there are things we do and don’t do that make us who we are. They understood at once and have never asked again to go to a burger joint, or for any kind of meat.”

  I continued, of course, to be tempted to challenge this noble picture he had of himself and of his children, but I asked instead if he’d ever, even once, succumbed to temptation or pressure to compromise his beliefs. He was only too eager to be asked.

  “When I was in high school, just after we arrived in Canada,” he related, “one of the guys in my class invited me along with some other classmates to a formal dinner given by his parents. I didn’t really know these boys, but I was the new kid in town and I appreciated the gesture.”

  Priya returned. She pulled out two of the stools on that side of the counter, seating herself and pointing out the other to him. He interrupted himself to say he’d been in the car for several hours and was happy to stand, then carried on with the same story. Priya nodded, and under her breath said, Yes, yes. He mumbled in response that he knew she’d heard this before, but he wanted to tell me. Priya lifted her palm, a gesture to say, Of course, go ahead.

  “The dinner was held in a large banquet hall — long tables formally set, and servers bringing out dishes, pouring drinks. I was in awe of everything then, having only just arrived in this country. Everything was brought and put on your plate for you. S
uddenly a plate with a steak was dropped down in front of me. In those days you weren’t asked about dietary restrictions, allergies, or anything like that.”

  I broke in, expressing an idea that was out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Yes, but nowadays it’s not just vegetarian or not — everybody has some damn thing they can’t or won’t eat. We’re all so fragile and don’t mind imposing on others to show concern for us. The other day we had to cater to someone who, besides being vegan, couldn’t eat fruit or vegetables with red skin.”

  As if some affinity between us had been cemented earlier on when we were alone, he broke into laughter. One would have thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. I am shallow; I was flattered.

  While I was speaking, Priya looked up at the glass shade that encased the ceiling light in which a plump food moth lazily circled. Her face was blank. So intentionally non-judgmental did she look that I felt she was in fact critical of my comment. “So? What did you do? Tell her,” she encouraged, still following with her eyes the erratic movements of the trapped moth.

  “So there in front of me was this big, sizzling, glossy slab of meat. I’d never had an experience like that before.”

  He was enjoying being the storyteller, unaware that Priya and I were really only half listening. I know her well enough; she wasn’t as rapt as he might have thought. She was, no doubt, dying to get out of the house with him. She had no idea how much I, too, wanted them to leave.

  “I’d never eaten meat. I mean, really, I didn’t know what to do,” he said, pausing to sip his tea and no doubt to prolong his moment onstage. “And on top of that, there was all that cutlery surrounding the plate. You see, at home in those days, if we weren’t eating with our hand, Indian-style, we’d most likely use a spoon. It was in my university days that I grew more used to eating with a knife and fork, but even today, I and my family eat using our hand when we are at home. It is more natural for us. The food tastes better this way.” He laughed at his own humour and pointed to the pot on the stove, saying, “Don’t worry, I eat spaghetti with a fork.”

  I smiled, and nodded to suggest I was grateful for this.

  “Anyway,” he carried on, “that was the least of my problems. Here was this big pinkish-brown thing lying on my plate, and in that moment it came to me that meat and meat-eating was a kind of emblem of Canada and of Canadianness, and I wanted there and then to be Canadian like the guys at the table cutting so confidently into all parts of their meal, those guys so completely oblivious to what was going on with me. I had to make a decision. I didn’t say anything. I just stared at the slab. I kept staring at it and it stared back at me. And we remained like that for an eternity.”

  Okay, Prakash, we get the picture, I wanted to say. I wondered if Priya and I would get a chance to chat privately before she left with him for the afternoon. I needed to tell her, at least for a start, that I wasn’t going to eat supper with them. I didn’t look forward to doing that.

  “I was thinking: what would it mean if I put even a small piece of that meat in my mouth? It was my first big test in this new country. You know, I felt so much appreciation for my parents and me being able to come to this country, but looking around me I knew, too, I didn’t want to lose my culture. We were despised back home, thrown out of the country for being Indian, but that’s what I was, an Indian. And I couldn’t afford not to be proud of this. I didn’t know what I would become, who I’d be, if I let even a drop of that bloodlike juice pooled on the plate around the slab touch my lips. And so, just like that, contemplating a plate of meat, I made the decision that that was not the way to become Canadian. I didn’t know how I could accomplish that very desirable identity in a single stroke, but I understood that it would have to include who I was at my core.”

  Ever since beginning this relationship, this partnership with Priya, I had often been reminded that I had not had to apply for or be granted citizenship to this country. And after living in this predominantly Caucasian countryside for so many years, I was experiencing in our kitchen what Priya experienced constantly amongst our friends: the revealing fact of difference, this time them — Priya and Prakash — from me. He and she could have passed for each other’s family. But people who didn’t know us as a couple and saw us standing side by side might never have assumed she and I, who were indeed family, were at all so. It is not enough to know you’re family with another person. The relationship takes on true meaning only when outsiders also agree upon and recognize it. Their recognition is an ingredient in the complex medium that gives the relationship a chance to grow and thrive.

  Still, I was born here. Priya and Prakash had to declare an oath of loyalty to this country when they became citizens. That fact is enough for them to have more in common with each other than either has with me. Thirty-something years later, Priya admits to still being moved when she sings the Canadian anthem. I have never had such an experience. Rather, I am critical of it. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to sing it. In fact, I want several of its words changed.

  Prakash took his eyes and his attention off Priya and spoke to us both. “You didn’t tell her how we met,” he said.

  I wanted to answer that the topic hadn’t come up between him and me, and his assumption was incorrect. But there was an agenda, I realized, in the statement. I let it play itself out.

  “Yes,” Priya responded, looking at me for corroboration and rising from her chair, ready, I thought, to escape with him. “I did. You know we met at university. Don’t you?”

  “But did you tell her how we actually met?” he insisted.

  Priya said something about table tennis, the club room in the basement of the McKinnon Science Building.

  “Yes, yes. Technically that’s true, but how did we start talking?” He sounded impatient. He wanted her, I imagined, to have cherished the memory as he had. “Well, let me tell you. I’ll tell you. Just a sec, you’ll see,” he said.

  While we waited, he drained his cup of tea and poured himself another.

  “When I arrived at the university, I knew no one,” he began. Priya rested her bum on the edge of her stool again. “I wasn’t into drinking and I didn’t have a girlfriend. So I didn’t have anything in common with the other students in my courses. I was staying at the YMCA, and I didn’t like it there. I was lonely. I wanted to meet people. So how do you meet people?”

  Apparently, the question wasn’t rhetorical, and he waited expectantly for an answer. I shrugged. Priya shook her head to say she didn’t know — he should get on with his story. Such liberties between them revealed their old closeness. But his eyebrows were raised, and he still waited. The two of them knew how they had met, and although my knowing it wasn’t going to enrich my life in any way, this story was clearly for my benefit.

  “How?” I acquiesced.

  “No, you tell me,” he said.

  Priya rolled her eyes theatrically and motioned with her hands for him to get on with it. And he did.

  “Well, you join a club.”

  “Of course,” I muttered.

  He carried on, “So I thought about it, and, since I used to be one of the top table-tennis players at my high school in Kampala, I decided to join the university’s table-tennis club. I saw you there the first night. Do you remember?” Priya nodded weakly. “And then a few days later I was in the Student Centre, and you were there, too. Isn’t that right? You saw me and you came and said hello. That was the very first time we talked. I’d never met a Trinidadian before. I’d always assumed Trinidadians, and all Caribbean people, were black, and I was surprised that an Indian-looking person could be Trinidadian. You asked if I wanted to get something to eat with you, and you pointed in the direction of the cafeteria. I told you I’d accompany you but that I’d been in the cafeteria and it was difficult for me to find things to eat there because I was vegetarian. Do you remember that? You told me to come to your apartment and you’d make dinner fo
r me. That night, you and Fiona — ” he paused, looked at me, and clarified “ — Priya’s roommate — ”

  To which I responded, perhaps noticeably defensively, “I know.”

  And he carried on, “ — made curried potatoes, cauliflower, and rice. I remember that meal to this day. It was the first time you’d cooked for me, but not the last. The three of us became close friends after that night.”

  I was not sure what the minutiae of their meeting was supposed to mean to me, but I felt as if the tip of a knife were being pressed against my skin. Was he informing me of how much they had in common, the length of their friendship, that there were people they knew in common who were unknown to me — of the primacy of his place in her life?

  I watched, but, truthfully, couldn’t see evidence of even a patina of an old love or fling between them. Why had she been so cagey about him, then? I don’t think I would have minded an ongoing friendship between them. He’s not my type, but he didn’t have to be. A presence like his in her life down here might have eased things for her, and by extension for me, for us. How often over the five years here had I had to bear the brunt of her hurt when a local thinks they’re complimenting her when they assure her they don’t think of her as “of colour,” that they think of her as one of them, as white? His presence in her life might have been enough to temper that pattern of behaviour she had when we were, say, at a dinner, chatting perhaps about what was on the family Christmas table when we were children. Everyone except Priya would have had what one might call “the usual” — turkey, cranberry sauce, Christmas pudding, parsnips, and turnips. She would remain silent, at least at first, as if waiting to see if anyone would think to ask her what was on her family table, the question being for her their acknowledgement of her difference from us and the possibility of hearing about interesting fare — like the pigeon pea soup, pastelles, ponch-de-crème, and sorrel drink I came to know from being with her — or customs they didn’t know about. It would be unfair to say there wasn’t interest, but her background was so foreign that our friends had trouble imagining it, and with the pace of conversation, everyone wanting to tell their own story, there really wasn’t usually the appetite to have details described and explained, she the star suddenly, being interviewed. What in those times we all wanted was not so much new knowledge as validation through having had common experiences: Yeah, that’s right, you too? No kidding. And what about this or that, wasn’t that hilarious? She was outnumbered. Those gatherings were about our similarities, not about our differences, and often what she interjected was amicably nodded at but not engaged with — poor things, I could see our friends didn’t even know what questions they could have asked of her — and so we’d return to what bonded the rest of us, like our hippie days — most of us having just clipped the end of the era, but enamoured of it because nothing had yet replaced it. Those days were a topic we loved, the drugs we experimented with, the so-called free love that was freer in reality for the guys we knew, but not for us women. Some of us took off and went to live for a minute or two in the bush and didn’t shave our legs, and chopped wood and bathed naked in the lakes. And all that awful food we used to eat so righteously — this grain and that lentil. We’d reminisce and howl with laughter, marvel at our inventiveness or resilience, or cringe at our tastes or activities back then. At some point Priya would break in, and knowing full well that her own experience of that time would fall flat at the feet of our friends, she’d still relate what “hippie” meant to a Trinidadian in those days, and I’d admire her for her courage and insistence on being part of the conversation. Hippie life in Trinidad, she’d say, was about what was being worn on Carnaby Street in England — bell-bottom pants, oversized colourful watches, flowered jeans, braided hair and bandanas, bare feet and toe rings, ankle bracelets. It was fashion and consumption. I knew our friends were thinking, Yeah, yeah — really, eh. But that’s not hippie life, and her version, sounding a little naive and thin, would land under the rug, and we’d turn back fast to recalling this sit-in, that love-in, that music festival, that demonstration. I’d feel for her; I’d feel her aloneness, and I’d try to fill in things I knew about her world, try to help her flesh out her stories so they’d understand. But in the end, I’d do it to her, too, I’d be right there with them, bonding over what they and I had in common. I did feel for her. It was tiring, though, to have, once we were back home in our private space, to commiserate with her against our friends. It made me have to acknowledge their failings, too, and this was isolating for me. When you live with a person of colour, never-ending problems that centre on how the world treats one and not the other enter your house, and these differences can alienate you from one another. And your house becomes not a haven in which harmony can be sought, but a refuge in which to hide. It gets unbearable when you’re hiding not together from the world, but from each other.