Bone and Bread

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Mama,” said Sadhana. “We just —”

  She broke off as Mama strode past us, seizing the bottle, wood chips flying from her flannel shirt. Neither of us had ever seen her lose her temper.

  Mama took a glass out of the cupboard and poured a double shot of tequila. “It’s been seventeen years,” she said. “Why not?” She held the glass up for a second, then downed it in one quick draught.

  “Buh!” She made a face and looked as if she were about to spit. Sadhana giggled, but I was too shocked to speak. Mama put down the glass and recapped the bottle, keeping her palm tight on the cap as though the whole thing might explode. Normally, Mama didn’t drink. She didn’t smoke or eat meat. She awoke every day before dawn, had a cold shower, and did meditation and yoga for two hours. She didn’t go shopping for clothes. She didn’t hold grudges. She never once raised her voice to us that I can remember.

  She was holy.

  “You have to respect the power of a substance like this,” she said. “You’re curious, kittens, but you’re too young.” She picked up the bottle and held it to the light. “This has ruined people, ruined lives. Body and soul. I’ve met some of them. It’s not worth the pain.” She held the bottle up by the neck and shook it. “And look at us, we’re stealing from our hosts.”

  “Why did you stop?” I asked.

  “Drinking? I was never much for it, baby. It’s poison for the body. But it was when I started yoga. And it’s against what I’ve worked for my whole life. Choosing to confuse my mind instead of opening it up to the truth.”

  “What about meat? How long is it since you’ve had it?” Sadhana had caught on to my idea. Keep Mama talking until she’d forgotten what we’d done, what we still had sitting on the table in front of us.

  “Longer. Since before I lived in California.”

  “Do you miss it?” Sadhana and I had had hamburgers once at a birthday party, though we’d made a pact never to confess. I’d gotten sick anyway.

  Mama looked thoughtful. “I miss roast chicken like my mother used to make.”

  “What did it taste like?” asked Sadhana.

  “Heaven,” said Mama, closing her eyes.

  “But you don’t eat animals anymore.”

  “That bird,” said Mama. “Maybe that one bird, I would.”

  “After all, it would be dead already,” I said. Mama swatted in my general direction as she got up from the table. Heading back out to start the fire, she handed me the bottle. “Put it away, girls, and come outside.”

  The cabin, built by geography professors on sloping land, vibrated with each step she took down the porch stairs. Once everything had stopped shaking, Sadhana raised her glass. “And?”

  I had to laugh. I picked mine up, too. “And.”

  We drank them fast the way Mama did.

  It was in spite of all this that we turned out normal. That’s what Sadhana said, though her observation came about the time I was in grade nine, when she was just turning twelve and I was just turning fourteen and had more than a few ambitions about just how much more normal I was going to become. She meant Mama’s strange philosophies, her uncanny enthusiasms. The way we’d battled over our lack of a television and how Sadhana used to beg to go over to her friend’s place to watch Punky Brewster until she learned that a well-timed lie could avoid one of Mama’s earnest eye-level interventions.

  We were sitting around a table draped in bright red crepe, at our mutual birthday dinner. As Mama made flourishes on the cake in the adjoining kitchen, squeezing sugar roses from the pastry bag and singing Pete Seeger, my sister was explaining how miraculous it was that we had come out on the other side of our childhood with a passable claim to ordinariness, with no outward signs of outlandishness or zeal. We were both in high school now, in the other half of the cement-block building where we’d started in kindergarten. In the green and yellow hallways of jostling, slouching, hollering teens, seventh-­graders like Sadhana were reminded of what it was like to be the lowest of the low.

  “Think about Emann,” she said, “and Judith-Christianne.” Sadhana regarded Emann, who wore a headscarf, and Judith-Christianne, a timid girl whose mother packed copies of The Watchtower into her lunch bag, with a strange pity. “We got off easy.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Emann was sporty and smart, not to mention twice as popular as I was.

  “Mama is not like other moms,” my sister said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”

  We had made a pact that we would not invite anyone over because we were, just then, exceedingly embarrassed by our mother. There was the little white turban, for one thing, that she rarely wore outside anymore, but often still wore at home. And there was the time she was on a mono-diet of bananas and herbal tea and Jennica Moore came over and saw so many banana peels in the garbage she asked if we kept a monkey.

  “It’s a religious thing,” I’d told her, while Sadhana glared. “I mean, a health thing,” I amended. “Cleansing. You fast from one full moon to the next and eat nothing but bananas.”

  “That is super weird.” Jennica Moore looked really shocked and was glancing around our kitchen as though hoping to find something worse. I saw her eyes pass over the bronze Nataraja statue of Shiva dancing and the Indian Buddha floating on a pedestal of lotus blossoms, both presiding over the room from a mint-green wall shelf. Laid out between them was a Tibetan prayer wheel on a wooden handle.

  Sadhana said, “I know, right? Really weird.” Jennica was her friend, and I just happened to be at home. Anything I said wrong could and would be held against me.

  That was when Sadhana began talking about Mama as though her ideas were a kind of contagion, a viral pattern of thinking that would alter us, in obvious and irrevocable ways, into earnest, off-kilter versions of ourselves, wearing all white to strengthen our auras or writing down our dreams to decode messages from our unconscious selves. I was not altogether against these ideas, these versions of me that might be closer to my mother, but I could see Sadhana’s point of view. Being like Mama in the world would be a bit like throwing yourself to the wolves.

  In the campaign for normality, hair was the next frontier, and while we waged war against our unibrows, Mama was rooting for the other side. Though she no longer abided by all the pronouncements of the holy gurus, the practices concerning hair happened to coincide with her own wisdom. She was adamant that we not cut it and wept the day Sadhana came home with a shoulder-length ponytail. My sister kissed our mother’s cheek before dropping the scissored end of her braid into Mama’s palm. “Here’s a little bit of God’s precious creation,” she said lightly.

  There was a particular look of shocked horror on Mama’s face that always made Sadhana laugh.

  It was the same month that Mama discovered our bag of disposable razors in the cupboard under the sink. She brought them to the breakfast table with an attitude that was half-quizzical, half-disappointed. Mama had stopped shaving her legs in the sixties, even before she converted.

  “I can’t stress enough how unnecessary this all is,” she said, regarding the pink plastic Bics with a degree of mournfulness. “Why do you think you need to do what everyone else does?”

  I felt my cheeks flushing as I hesitated, while Sadhana said, too fast, “We don’t. You’re right.” I gave her a quick look and saw that she was trying to finish the conversation.

  But Mama was satisfied. “You’re perfect the way you are, kittens,” she said, cupping my face as she tilted it up with her cool hand. “It’s what’s inside that matters.”

  So we started concealing our stash in the bedroom. Razors, wax, Nair, tweezers, all stowed away behind a row of Nancy Drews on the bookcase. I had a qualm or two, thinking about what Mama had said to us, but Sadhana staved off any hesitation.

  “She’s a redhead,” said my sister, shrugging. “What does she know about moustaches?”

  That year Mam
a gave us each a blank notebook for our birthdays. “Stay in touch with yourselves,” she said, without a trace of wryness, “if not with me.” It was possible that she sensed how our idea of her had started shifting. Each notebook had a bright woven cover and delicate pages the colour of coffee stains.

  Sadhana hugged hers to her chest. “I’m going to use mine to keep a journal,” she said. “And you better not read it.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Mama. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “I know, Mama. I meant Beena.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Same goes for mine.” I wrote DIARY on the flyleaf and announced that I was going to hide it in our room, though I thought it seemed like a chore to write about things that had already happened.

  Mama bought one for herself that she was going to keep beside her bed for writing down dreams. Elise, one of her yoga-teacher friends, did dream analysis. Of Mama’s strange recurring dream of brightly coloured parrots tumbling from the sky, Elise had said, “There’s nothing waiting for you in heaven that you don’t already have on Earth.” As she related both the dream and its interpretation, it was clear that Mama was eager to hear what Elise might say next. She left us to rinse the plates from the birthday dinner and bid us an early goodnight, patting her stomach. “A full belly is better for dreaming,” she said, laughing. “Wish me luck.”

  After we could hear Mama’s light snoring, my sister dared me to hide Mama’s turban. Sadhana had wide-open, mischievous eyes that spoke of a post-cake sugar rush.

  “No way,” I said. There were some things Mama could joke about, but that wasn’t one of them.

  But Sadhana wasn’t to be put off. “Chicken,” she said, and while I wondered if I really was, she ran and shoved Mama’s turban into the bottom of the laundry hamper and returned to our bedroom in a fit of giggles. Although Mama had mostly stopped wearing it outside by the time we started school, she still wrapped her head before doing yoga. She said it helped keep the bones of the skull in place and channel positive energy.

  “I wear it for all the reasons that your uncle wears it,” she said as she scolded us the next morning. “And why Papa used to. For the reasons all proud Sikhs wear it. It is a very courageous thing to do when so many people around you despise you for it. Or even attack you. Or your business.”

  “Your business,” I repeated.

  “Do you remember the fire?” said Mama, and we nodded. “Well, that happened because somebody didn’t like seeing Uncle behind the counter in his turban.”

  Sadhana raised her eyebrows. “I thought that was an anti-Jewish thing done by neo-Nazis who were too stupid to realize who was running the bagel shop.”

  “Really?” I said. For some reason, my sister and I had never talked about the people who had set the fire. Maybe because we were too afraid.

  Sadhana tucked her feet up under her. “Yeah. I remember Uncle trying to wash off the swastikas.”

  “The swastika isn’t just a symbol against Judaism anymore,” said Mama. “It’s a symbol of intolerance and prejudice against all kinds of people.”

  Sadhana said, “Bagel haters, then. Anti-bagelists.”

  I cracked up, and Mama looked severe.

  “Do you think there was anything funny about the fire?”

  I fell silent.

  Mama said that for most people there was a difference between claiming to believe something and actually showing you believed it by changing the way you looked. “It’s different from wearing punk or hippie clothes, which are mostly just a fashion statement. A turban is anti-fashion.”

  When Mama showed such startling awareness, it only made me more worried for her. For it seemed that her way of living, of always seeing the best in us, was more precarious than I could ever have imagined.

  At a certain point, if you had asked my mother, she would have said that she was lucky. She had lost her parents and her husband, and her dead husband’s brother regarded her as an interloper, and her world, which must have once seemed so open, so boundless and unpredictable, had soon narrowed to the domestic sphere of two inexhaustible little girls. Nevertheless, she considered herself one of the most fortunate people she knew.

  “I have loved and been loved, and every day that goes by, I am grateful to be alive.” She explained this to us with relentless patience over supper or during bathtime or while brushing out and braiding our long black hair. Before bed, she sometimes still pointed out her lucky star, that blinking repository of wishes we strained to see through the glass. “When you are all grown up, my own loves, you might find out how blessed we are.”

  In anyone else, it might have seemed as if they were trying to convince themselves. But Mama claiming her own good fortune was like a master artist declaring a work complete, one long, thoughtful pause after flinging the final blotch of paint at an abstract canvas. Saying it made it so, for who was there to say any different?

  But I thought I knew better. The older we got, the smaller Mama seemed, not only because we had grown, but as we needed her less and less, she, in turn, seemed to miss Papa more. She didn’t speak about him any more than she used to, but I could tell she was sad. Her narrative impulse had returned. Whenever she made her spiced tea after breakfast, she began to tell us stories about her parents.

  “They were American,” she said. “Did you know that? From a little town in Florida, so humid you could count the droplets as they hung in the air.”

  “But you’re from Ireland,” said Sadhana.

  “I am. They visited Galway on their honeymoon and decided to stay.”

  Mama described how her parents had bought an old house in disrepair and converted it into a tiny hotel they named the Quarry, since the yard was choked with stone. Mama’s father learned how to balance rocks, filling the backyard with virtuoso towers of stones, their massive weights improbably balanced end to end. Inside the hotel, the front and back staircases were lined with Mama’s mother’s clock collection. The floors were covered in multicoloured rag rugs she’d made during three Florida summers squandered inside by the fan.

  “I bet you miss it,” said Sadhana. She was better than I was at interjecting during Mama’s reminiscences. Whenever sadness clung to Mama’s voice, I became nervous and silent.

  “I do,” said Mama. “Almost as much as your grandmother’s roast chicken.” Mama never seemed to remember that we already knew everything about the chicken.

  The chicken in its ideal form, the sense memory as described by our mother, might have loomed even larger than our grandparents in our collective mythology.

  “At least missing something means you remember it,” said Sadhana, and I looked at her in surprise.

  Mama pulled her close and kissed her brown cheek. “My wise little kittens,” she said.

  Sadhana and I decided to make it. It was my idea. It was going to be Mama’s cheering-up meal once she got back from a yoga retreat weekend she was leading in the country.

  The checkout lady balked when she saw what we were trying to buy. “This is a little out of the ordinary, isn’t it, girls?” Sometimes she teased Mama about how we bought vegetables she didn’t even know the names of. “I have all the normal register codes memorized,” she’d say. “You’re the only ones keeping me on my toes.” She wrapped the dead chicken in a plastic bag before putting it in our cloth bag with the other groceries.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Sadhana. “We’re doing a surprise.”

  “Be careful,” said the lady. “A chicken is a different animal than a zucchini.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We know all about salmonella.” It was part of the latter dozen of reasons Mama recited when anyone asked her why we were vegetarians.

  Mama’s friend Deana was the one who drove her home from the country. I turned on the outside light so Mama could see to get her key in the lock.

  “It smells so good in here,” said Mama once she g
ot inside. “I must be dreaming.”

  Sadhana had set the table, and we all sat down. Sadhana and I held our forks in reserve until we saw Mama eating.

  “This is delicious,” she said, after the first bite. But on the second bite she started coughing. She reached for her glass of water and took a drink. She started sputtering and coughing again.

  My sister and I exchanged a glance. Part of me thought it was one of Mama’s routines — pretending meat would poison her, that sort of thing. Her coughs became almost soundless. Little ghosts of coughs. I laughed. Mama shook her head, shoulders seizing up towards her ears. She waved at the door.

  Sadhana ran downstairs for help. I could hear her footsteps echoing along the metal walkway that led out over the courtyard, and the door swinging closed behind her. I stayed frozen to the spot. Mama slammed the table with both hands. She pointed at me. I jumped to my feet and put the glass of water up to her mouth, but she refused it, shaking her head. She looked angry, her face turning purple. She pulled her plate of chicken off the table and it smashed. Her eyes were bulging. She staggered to her feet and threw herself against the wall. Her hands were at her throat.

  “Here, Mama,” I said, bringing her the water again, but she was sliding down to the floor. There was blood on her foot from where it had caught on a shard of plate.

  We knew how to smudge sage, how to make dye from plants, how to strengthen our auras. We’d practiced chanting mantras and spinning wool and making Indian cheese. But we didn’t know what to do if someone was choking. I’m not sure we even knew what choking was.

  “I thought she was coughing,” I told Sadhana over and over afterwards. “Just coughing.” At the hospital they told us that a bone from the chicken had become trapped in her airway. They told us she was dead.