“Do you know about the kundalini, Uncle?” Sadhana was sitting cross-legged on the rug when she was supposed to be getting ready for school. Neither of us had tried much with Uncle, but sometimes she just talked for talking’s sake. “We can teach you how to meditate so that you can raise the kundalini energy up through your spine. Right now I suspect you have a blockage in your svadhisthana.”
Uncle was retying his turban, wrapping a five-metre swathe of maroon cloth with an intricate technique, as he held one end of it in his teeth, then pinched the fabric at the top of his forehead as he angled the folds of material. I slurped cereal at the kitchen table while Sadhana waited for Uncle to respond. After what felt like a long time, he took the end out of his mouth and tucked it in over his right ear, speaking to my sister without looking at her. “Can’t you be quiet?” he said. “Good girls are quiet girls.”
We were grateful yet sulky about the long hours he spent working at the shop. If anything he worked longer hours now that he lived right upstairs and home was no longer a place of perfect frozen dinners, cable television, and an immaculate lawn but a cramped two-bedroom apartment with no air conditioning and two bereaved teenage girls with cried-out saucer eyes who stared at him like a jailer.
Though at first we were united against Uncle, the fellow feeling that had sprung up between me and Sadhana seemed in danger of dissolving. One night after she snapped at me during dinner, I waited until she was taking a bath and slipped her diary out from where I had seen her hide it between her mattress and the box spring.
She had filled far more pages in her birthday notebook than I had, as though she had been writing in it steadily since Mama gave them to us. I flipped to the most recent page and, spotting my own name, was overcome with such mingled feelings of guilt and dread that I shut it at once and slid it back under the mattress. But knowing the diary was there made reading irresistible, and before the week was out I had looked at it four more times.
Each new foray into Sadhana’s notebook brought with it more mortification. It was almost as if she suspected I was reading it and was creating ever more horrible observations as punishment. Far from being an inventory of crushes or a logbook of secret languages or anything that our childhood had prepared me to find, my sister’s diary resembled most closely a catalogue of grievances with accompanying insults. I recognized the names of teachers, of girls in her class and in her soccer league, but the principal offender, appearing on nearly every page, was me. The time I hadn’t stopped to help her find her headband in the morning, the way I finished my homework before she did, the style of my hair — all of these might as well have been crimes against humanity from the way they were described in the pages of my sister’s diary. As a result, I was deemed a jerk, a show-off, a total fashion disaster. When I read Beena’s face is so fat it looks like a pecan pie, I had to snap it shut before my tears could mar the ink.
With each successive furtive reading, the shame of looking drained away, replaced instead by a growing outrage for which there could be no expression and no redress. Even Uncle came off better than I did in the world according to Sadhana’s diary. But though my sister and I had stopped confiding in one another, a slight hardness in her demeanour was the only clue that she might despise me.
“What’s eating you?” she asked one morning as we walked to school. Sadhana had mentioned the upcoming Halloween dance, and I had not done much more than grunt in response.
“Nothing.” The word came out with as much bile as I could squeeze into it. Sadhana stared at me, then shrugged. She knew I loved Halloween. She also had no patience for people who were mad and couldn’t say so — a claim I was beginning to question, given the contents of the diary. We walked the rest of the way to school in silence.
If I could have told Mama, if she were still around to tell, I knew she would say that Sadhana didn’t mean any of it. She would have reminded me of my own unkind thoughts and pointed out that Sadhana had never uttered a single one of the insults she had written down. Definitely, I would get in trouble for snooping. Mama might even have praised my sister for her honesty, explaining that it was better to purge those nasty thoughts from your system by writing them all out. It was possible that Sadhana would have gotten in trouble too, but far from guaranteed.
I said all these things to myself and I tried to believe them. None of them offered any solace for what I had read. The only idea I could fix on was that it was Uncle who was the problem, who had come into our house like our own misery made flesh, and in his blunt bulk had become the wedge around which my sister and I could no longer see eye to eye — even if, in the moment, we were united against him.
The lengths Uncle would go to in order to protect his peace and quiet became the battle lines of our domestic wars. He began with scolding, moved on to shouting, uttering threats, wielding punishments, and when all that proved to be ineffective in bringing our benign misdeeds to a close, he ended with a morose monologue cataloguing his woes and persecutions. He had unrealistic ideas about how quiet two teenaged girls could be within a confined space, and he was more or less right when he claimed we had no respect for him. “I should take in a couple of stray dogs,” he shouted one night. “At least they would do what I ask.”
After a time his bullying stopped frightening us. Sadhana and I steeled ourselves against his bellowing and he had nothing else up his sleeve. When Uncle tried to get rid of my white tape deck, he left it out on the street with the garbage and I just ran down and grabbed it. When he told Sadhana she wasn’t allowed to go out after supper, she went out anyway.
Sadhana held herself apart. If anything she was rude to Uncle, and I followed her lead. It was only too easy to cast him as the enemy. I backed her up in the hope that Uncle might succeed me as the villain in her diary, even though I had stopped reading it.
A favourite tactic in Sadhana’s arsenal was over-salting his food. Once we had served ourselves, she would add an extra teaspoon of salt or cayenne to Uncle’s bowl before calling him to the table. This continued on and off for two weeks before even the sight of Uncle’s sweating brow and the certain knowledge of his discomfort could bring us no pleasure, nor gratify our sense of vengeance for his attempts to control us. I pitied him, even as he banged the table and demanded we refill his water glass, denouncing us as the worst cooks and the worst girls anyone was ever unfortunate enough to have as nieces.
He sat unmoving at the table while we cleared the dishes, and remained there as I stood washing them while Sadhana had her bath. He was shaking his head with what looked like a fury precluding words.
“Uncle,” I said.
“Are you trying to kill me?”
“No,” I said, horrified. Though of course he knew about Mama’s accident, Sadhana and I had never told him about the chicken, that it was something we had prepared for her. “What do you mean?”
“My heart,” he said, and I blinked. It was something Mama used to call me.
“Uncle?”
“My heart.” He touched his palm to his chest.
For a confused moment I wondered if he had given way at last to affection, but it turned out he was anxious about his blood pressure. Papa had died so young from a heart attack, after all, and Uncle said their own grandfather had died the same way. He had been to the doctor and he was on some pills, but he’d been advised to monitor his blood pressure and avoid salt and cholesterol.
“I am not sure,” he said, “what is cholesterol and what is not.” He went into the bedroom and came back with a stethoscope and a brown and black contraption he said was a blood pressure cuff. “My friend, Doctor Ernie Davidson got me this,” he said, which surprised me. I had not thought of Uncle as someone who had any friends. Maybe an esteemed customer. “I need your help to put it on so that it is very tight.”
I helped him wrap it snugly around his upper arm, pulling it taut with all my strength and relishing the crunch of the Velcro as it
folded closed. As I did so, Uncle explained how it worked. The cuff had a dial on it that looked a little like a watch. I got the feeling he was talking so as not to look at me. We had never stood so close to one other, at least not since I was a little girl and Papa was alive.
“Can I pump it up?” I said. Uncle said yes, and the metal pincers of the stethoscope went into his ears as he placed its smooth circle on the inside of his elbow.
He nodded at me. I squeezed the black bulb shaped like a shallot until the cuff swelled like a balloon around his arm, and I returned the pump to his hand as he gave me a look that called for silence. Then he let it deflate, listening for something as he stared at the gauge. When it was over, he kept staring at his arm, seeming every bit as concerned as he had before.
“Was that your own blood you were listening to?” I asked. The idea was both interesting and disgusting.
Uncle looked at me as though bewildered. “Why can’t you put less salt?” He sounded angry. “Why can’t you both just be nice girls?”
I sit down on the steps outside Sadhana’s apartment with the sense that I’ve locked a mystery behind me. The June sun glares down with a radiance that defies death, and I think about phoning Libby, the woman who left me the message about Sadhana, but I hardly feel up to talking to a stranger. Shielding my eyes behind the maple, I feel like I’m returning from another planet. Pulling out my phone before I can change my mind, I dial Evan’s number.
“Good for you,” he says, when I tell him where I am.
“Not really. I’m outside.”
“Something’s the matter.”
The sympathy in Evan’s voice almost makes me want to cry. Below me on the sidewalk, there are two girls giggling together on their way to the corner. Neither of them looks up to see me. “I just don’t understand how it happened.”
“You told me she was sick. For a long time.”
“She was.” But she had been better too, though I don’t know quite how to explain it to him. All that back and forth between sickness and health. “I don’t understand,” I say, “how nobody found her for a week.”
“It’s bad luck, Beena.” Evan sounds unfazed. I wonder if he has uncovered any corpses in the line of duty. “It’s what happens when people live alone. It’s not your fault.”
I say nothing. My baby sister, come apart like that.
“Beena.”
“It is.” My voice is small and my stomach churns with an ache that might be hunger, but I can’t tell. “My fault. I’m the reason she did this.”
“I thought you said she died of a heart attack.” Surprise makes him sound younger, less reassuring, as though there is a part of himself held back while playing the cool head in a crisis. “Are you saying she killed herself?”
“Of course I’m not saying that,” I return, without conviction. Over the years, even as her body wasted and she refused food, Sadhana always claimed she didn’t want to die. Mostly, I had believed her. “I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else. How are you?”
“Go back in there, Bee. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”
My scuffed shoes recede from my blank look as I partner up for one set of a recriminatory dance with my voice of reason. I know he’s right, that the apartment is just a backdrop — neither an accusation nor an epiphany.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m going.” And after I hang up, my finger really does touch the metal of the key in my pocket. But when I get to my feet, they carry me the rest of the way down the stairs and out along the sun-baked sidewalk that feels firmer with every step taking me away.
A few hours later, Quinn and I convene outside the shop. It has been so long that Uncle is almost pleased to see us. He greets us outside the apartment as though he has been awaiting our arrival, leaning from his chair to hear the whistling slam of the door at the top of the stairs. A walkway hugs the courtyard along its upper levels, and as we start across he is already padding forward to meet us, his wool slippers silent on the grated metal below the thundering racket of my rolling suitcase. At a look from Uncle, Quinn bends slightly to pick it up. My purse slips from my shoulder to the crook of my elbow, and with nothing to carry, my hands come together uselessly at the front of my waist, like anxious bystanders, for they do not know, have never known, what to do here.
“Hi,” I say, and Uncle nods at me. He looks pale under the fading evening sun, and it occurs to me that I carry no image of him in the daylight, only one of him ruling us inside the apartment and another of him holding sway over the bagel boys under the fluorescent lights of the shop downstairs.
There is a moment as I fumble with my hair and look at Quinn, and he steps ahead of me to shake his great-uncle’s hand in a sure move. The sky blue of his polo shirt is the same colour as Uncle’s turban. “Hello, Uncle,” he says.
My uncle scratches at a spot to the side of his nose, just above the start of his moustache. Nearly sixty, his beard is still uniformly black. Papa’s younger brother by fourteen years, he was born the same year as Mama, and this might have been the start of their antipathy: Uncle’s disapproval of Mama’s full-blown love affair with his thirty-seven-year-old brother. Though she always told us it was because she was white, because Uncle didn’t believe that she really wanted to be Sikh.
“Come in and eat,” says Uncle. “You must be hungry.”
Inside, we take off our shoes and carry our bags into my old bedroom. The apartment smells of curry and the campfire smoke of the wood ovens in the bagel shop downstairs. There is another smell too, of artificial pine, the strong perfume of the fabric softener sheets my uncle puts in the dryer. In terms of functionality, he has improved the place, with the laundry facilities he installed when Quinn was a baby, the metal grid frame hung from the kitchen ceiling for storing pots and pans, and the addition of sliding screen doors on the balconies to keep out the bugs. Mama’s way was to keep pace with only the most pressing repairs alongside her own pet renovations, which tended towards the spiritual or the ornamental, like rearranging the furniture according to seasonal energies or sewing curtains out of old paisley skirts. In between, she squeezed caulking into the gaps around the pink toilet and tub and glued down the wooden kindling of our aged parquet floor as it scuffed away underfoot like a disintegrating jigsaw puzzle. When we were older, she took an upholstering class at the community centre and covered a yellowing armchair with a swathe of green corduroy.
Piece by piece, after we moved out, Sadhana and I carried away almost every item we could claim as our mother’s, but there are still a few lingering signs of her, even so long after her death and a full fifteen years of Uncle’s bachelor living. It is only his disinterest in decor that has allowed her choices to endure for nearly two decades: cream walls with mossy trim in the bedrooms, a rich buttercup in the kitchen, light brown in the living room like a dusty road. My old bedroom, mine and Sadhana’s, and Quinn’s for a while, is mostly untouched, even the furniture. I asked Uncle, once, why he had left it alone, and he said it was as good a guest room as any. But it could be that he does not have many guests.
“I was only planning a light dinner when you called,” says Uncle, “so I picked up a pizza.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That would be a strange joke, don’t you think?”
“Pizza,” I say. Never once had Uncle given in to our teenage pleas for a pepperoni reprieve from cooking duties. “Great.”
“Super!” Enthused, Quinn hurries to set out plates.
Uncle lowers his voice. “How did it go at the apartment?”
“There’s a lot to do,” I say. I decide not to mention that I lasted only twenty minutes in Sadhana’s apartment. After calling Evan, I’d spent the afternoon at the library, walking up and down the aisles as though I were at a museum, with the same stuttering pace and spectatorly remove. Then picking up books with deliberation and putting them down somewhere else. Driftin
g from chair to chair.
“Nothing anyone else could have done for you,” says Uncle.
“I know,” I say. “I didn’t mean it like that. Of course I have to be the one to do it.”
Uncle eats with his forearms on the table, head lowered close to his plate. Quinn watches us carefully, rolling the handle of a fork between fingers and thumb before picking up his pizza with both hands. I can’t tell whether it is only his aversion to conflict or some concern on my behalf that is making him uncomfortable. The rims of his ears are turning red, like peaches in the sun. “I’m looking forward to moving here,” he says. “Do you think I’ll like it, Uncle?”
“I imagine you will, yes.”
“I’m going to start taking programming classes in freshman year,” says Quinn. I look at him, and he tugs at the cuffs of his short shirtsleeves. “The whole curriculum sounds rigorous,” he says.
Uncle nods. “That’s good.” He wears a look of full approval, his whole face altered from any usual expression. His cheeks filling out like Papa’s in my parents’ wedding photos.
I sip my water and bring my glass down hard. “Rigorous?” I say, snorting. “At least part of the attraction of the rigorous program has to be Montreal’s reputation for beautiful women.” It’s like I am sixteen at this table, always. It’s like Sadhana’s at my ear, egging me on.
But Uncle only says, “I imagine your son is more sensible than you give him credit for.” His tranquility unruffled, he continues eating, and Quinn shoots me a dark look, no doubt wondering, as I am, why I would choose to open him up to attack.
After supper, I make a pot of chamomile tea, while Uncle turns on the national news. Quinn holds fast in the kitchen laying waste to a fourth slice and, like one of the pigeons that flock outside the shop, to three of my untouched pizza crusts.
“A lot of Quebec headlines,” I say from the couch. Uncle grunts and pulls his armchair closer to the television.
Bone and Bread Page 10
