The Beauty of the Moment

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “Thank God.” Alisha looks relieved. “You have real talent, Suzy. And the great part is that you can do something about it. Not like the rest of us here who are stuck with the option of doctor, lawyer, engineer, or accountant.”

  “I doubt it. When I first signed up for art, Amma said, ‘Oh, why art? Why not French? That’ll be more useful!’” Alisha and I roll our eyes. “She only gave in when Appa backed me up, saying I needed to have some fun with my other courses.”

  The irony of my father classifying a school course as fun did not escape me, but in this case, I didn’t mind the comparison.

  “But your dad is still a little more flexible than your mom, right?” Alisha insists hopefully. “Maybe you should ask him about art school.”

  It isn’t a bad idea. Appa has always been more receptive of my art than Amma. It’s probably why he’s my favorite parent—even though I would never tell Amma that. When I was little, he’d often put up the drawings I made for him on the fridge. In Class VII, when one of my sketches—a portrait of my youngest cousin from India—placed third in Qala Academy’s art exhibition, he took a picture of it on his phone and sent it to all our relatives in India.

  “Or better yet, rebel, dummy!” Alisha says, when I don’t respond. “What’s the point of being a teenager otherwise?”

  “Yeah, well, sorry I don’t meet your expectations,” I joke.

  But the comment stings. I wonder if this attitude of mine—this lack of rebellion—stands out to my new classmates as well, driving them away from me. Who, Susan? Oh, she’s no fun. She only studies all the time. I’d heard the comments before, even in Jeddah.

  “… and I need to … Susan? Susan! Soo-sun!” Alisha shouts into the mic, Verghese Madam–style, jerking me back into the conversation.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I zoned out.”

  “It’s okay. I need to go. Studying. Again.” She groans.

  I sigh. “Bye, Alisha.”

  “Bye, Suzy.”

  I watch Alisha blip offline—after fourteen minutes of conversation—and turn back to my binder, to the neat pages of physics and calculus homework I’ve already completed. I could get started on the King Lear essay, a thousand-word literary analysis. But with the deadline two weeks away, it suddenly no longer feels like a priority.

  It would not be like this in Jeddah. In Jeddah, I would be reading ahead like Alisha and the others, trying to prepare myself for my classes the next day. It was almost mandatory over there, especially during your final year, with the Class XII board exams hanging over your head like a guillotine.

  It’s one of the few things about my old school that I do not miss. Here, classes are more relaxed. Even before a quiz, I often hear students discussing other things—crappy bosses at work, the latest Game of Thrones episode, younger and older siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends, unrequited crushes. No one is squeezing their eyes shut and muttering prayers; no one is feverishly going over their notes.

  Heather Dupuis smiles and says hi now whenever she sees me in physics. I smile and greet her back. This is usually the extent of our conversation—Heather has other friends she normally talks to during class—but it’s nice to be acknowledged when I’m still miles away from fitting in with the other kids at school.

  Amma and I might not stand out for being brown-skinned in this new city, but assimilating into the culture is another story. My father does not get this. He talks about becoming Canadian like it’s a destination: a utopia of privilege that comes with a first-world citizenship, a house instead of an apartment, two cars, and a dog in the backyard. “That’s what so many people did before us,” he told me when we first talked about moving. “That is what we will do as well.”

  We, as in all three of us, not just me and Amma.

  In Jeddah, Indian expats joke about a whole street of buildings across from the Mississauga Civic Centre, where new immigrants buy apartments to deposit their wives and kids in, and then return to their tax-free, high-paying jobs in the Gulf. Begumpura, they call the place: the City of Wives. “Now the City is expanding thanks to your father,” Amma told me sarcastically, and I knew she wasn’t referring to Mississauga.

  Thoughts of Amma remind me of our argument this morning. I sigh, knowing I shouldn’t have blown up at her like that. I find her in the living room, her nose buried in a romance novel, completely ignoring me even when I clear my throat.

  “Amma, I’m sorry.”

  Silence.

  “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.”

  Amma’s mouth purses ever so slightly at one corner. She turns the page, saying nothing.

  “Please, Amma.”

  I’m thinking of the numerous ways I’ve groveled before my mother in the past and which ones have worked, when Amma replies, “Sorry doesn’t make a dead person alive.”

  Okay, she’s talking. A good sign.

  “Oh?” I walk casually to the sofa and sit down. “Has my amma been replaced by a ghost? Maybe I should check and see.”

  Amma’s eyes shoot daggers at me. “Don’t you dare!”

  I lunge, letting out my best horror-movie laugh. It cracks through my mother’s stern facade, makes her burst into laughter as well, even though she grabs hold of my fingers before they reach her ticklish left side. Her arm wraps around my neck and draws me close, cloaking me with the smells of my childhood: steamed rice and jasmine oil, spices and coffee.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she says now. “I shouldn’t be so critical of everything.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “By the way, your Yvonne Chechi is visiting her parents for the weekend,” Amma says, referring to Bridgita Aunty’s daughter, who is also my second cousin. “Bridgita told me she’s arriving this afternoon and that she wants to speak to you and catch up on all the gossip before she goes.”

  I laugh, a small weight lifting off my shoulders. Yvonne isn’t really my older sister, but I’ve always called her chechi. During large family gatherings in India, Yvonne and I always ended up together at the same end of a table or side by side on a sofa, mostly ignored by the rest of our cousins. “The two non-resident outcasts,” Yvonne liked to joke.

  Yvonne is the only one apart from Appa who is capable of deflecting my mother’s attention from me when I’m being criticized, the only person in our family who saw—and fully approved of—my art.

  “Can Yvonne Chechi come visit?” I ask, making a mental note to call her tonight.

  “She goes back to Hamilton tomorrow night for university. Next time we’ll tell her to stay longer, yes?”

  Amma gives me a squeeze and, for a moment, I’m thrown back into the past. To a time when my feelings for her simply ranged between love and more love.

  “Amma, what if I want to take art at university?” The question floats out, hovers multihued in the air like a bubble.

  What if?

  My mother squeezes tighter. “Come, kanna.” Her arm slides off. “It’s time for lunch.”

  I follow her to the kitchen, even though my heart has sunk to somewhere around my knees. “Amma, I really think—”

  “Be serious, Suzy.” She lifts a lid off the pot of sambhar and turns on the stove. “It’s one thing to paint as a hobby, but as a career? You’ll only be stuck with a liberal arts degree that will leave you unemployed or married too early.” She undoes the lid of the Crock-Pot holding idlis, and ladles a few of the steaming rice cakes onto a plate. “Look at what happened to me.”

  “It’s not the same thing!” Not this again.

  “Isn’t it? I thought I was following my dream as well, marrying your father before I even got my degree. He said I would be able to combine both—my love for him and my love for science.” Her laughter is as rich as coffee, and as bitter. “I thought it was the most romantic thing he ever said to me. It probably was.”

  This is the part of her love story that Amma never tells our relatives: the bit where her Happy Ever After turns into a Lifetime of Drudgery. In me, Amma sees a way to live the futur
e she could have had if she’d stayed in college in India, busy with Bunsen burners, instead of spending the last sixteen years behind a kitchen stove in Saudi Arabia.

  “I’ll ask Appa,” I say defiantly. “I’ll see what he says.”

  “Fine.” There’s an oddly pitying look on my mother’s face. “Come, now. Let’s set the table for lunch.”

  Malcolm

  I see the drawing by accident, thanks to a stray breeze flipping a page in Susan Thomas’s binder, leaving the sketch unguarded while she stands at the front in English next to Zuric’s desk, asking him a question she probably already knows the answer to.

  It’s one of those rare classes when everyone is supposed to be working on some sort of group project, which is pretty much license for anyone and everyone to talk as much as they want to without doing any real work. Beside me, Ahmed and Steve are cracking jokes about some kid who fell flat on his face during basketball practice yesterday, their copies of King Lear lying untouched in front of them.

  I lean out farther, my nose nearly brushing the chair in front.

  Zarin Wadia, the caption reads. In Memoriam. A pretty girl with a smile on her lips, a scarf loosely covering her cropped black curls. She’s wearing one of those black cloak-like things some Muslim girls wear with their hijabs. Only I know she isn’t Muslim—or not entirely anyway—because of her surname. Her undoubtedly Parsi surname.

  At the knee, where the cloak flies open, I see the loose trousers of a salwar, white like the one Mom sometimes wore when I was younger, and black sneakers. I blink a couple of times, as I look closer: the girl is holding a cigarette in one hand. A shadow falls over the page and the binder shuts with a thump.

  I look up into Susan’s angry eyes. “Nice drawing,” I say.

  There’s a long pause before she answers. “Thank you.”

  “She’s pretty.” I grin.

  “She’s dead,” she says flatly.

  “Whoa. I’m sorry,” I manage to say, after a pause. I look at Susan a little more closely and add another bit of what I know of her to the list in my head: Susan Thomas, smart girl who keeps to herself, and draws dead Parsi girls.

  “What school did you go to?” I ask. “It wasn’t here, was it?”

  “Qala Academy. And you’re right. It’s a school in Saudi Arabia.”

  Saudi Arabia. The name instantly conjures up images of deserts, camels, and veiled women—images that my maternal uncle, Mancher, told me once were as stereotypical as the Parsis Bollywood depicts in its movies.

  “Where in Saudi Arabia?” I ask.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “No, my mama—uh, I mean my mom’s brother worked there for four years. I was born here.”

  “Oh.”

  The interest in her eyes dims. It’s the disappointment on her face that gets to me, that urges me to continue the conversation when I normally would have stopped.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Did you live there?”

  “Yeah. In Jeddah. Grew up there.”

  “What was it like?” Truth is, I’m kind of curious. “I mean, I’ve heard things about it.” From Mancher Mama, who hated it and said we were lucky we never had to live in a place like it.

  She looks at me for a long moment. “We didn’t go to school on camels, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  I feel my face heat up.

  But then Susan laughs—a funny sort of laugh that’s almost a wheeze. She covers her mouth, cheeks flushing.

  “It’s not your fault. It’s … I always get that look from people when I tell them I lived there. Like I was living in some primitive magic-carpet land and not a cosmopolitan city with beaches and highways and malls and a population of nearly three million.”

  “Can you blame us after the things we see on TV?”

  But Susan doesn’t seem amused by my joke. If anything, she looks pissed off.

  “Kidding.” I wonder how I’ve managed to put both feet in my mouth in my very first conversation with this girl.

  The silence between us grows thick, awkward.

  She’s settled back in her chair when I speak up again. “Hey, Susan. Feel like eating a shawarma? My brain might be clueless about most things, but my stomach never fails to sense greatness.” I rub a hand over it. Partly to suppress the rumble that comes with thoughts of sliced beef and pickles on pita.

  Susan’s smile is less frosty this time, making me wonder if her lips are as soft as they look. “Is there a good place here?”

  “Probably not as good as the ones back there. But this place that I know of isn’t too bad. If we skipped last period, we could take the bus there and get back before school lets out.”

  Her smile slips. Her hand hovers in the air almost as if debating someone inside her head. It lands on my desk, about four inches away from my fingers. “I can’t skip school. My mom would kill me.”

  “How about after school, then?”

  She goes red, mutters something about homework. Her hands, those strangely expressive hands of hers, fidget, as if searching for something to hold on to.

  For the most part, I’m pretty good at reading people, a skill that Mahtab says I got from our mom. But Susan’s expressions are hard for me to decipher. Such as the fine line between her brows, which could be a synonym for anything from hating my guts to having overprotective parents who don’t want her going out with boys to really having homework.

  Her eyes flicker to my lips and back up again. I’m pretty sure she does not mean it the way I think she does, but it throws me off for a second. It’s moments like these that confuse me about this girl, that make me wonder if she secretly thinks of me the way I think of her. Late at night, when there is no one trying to read my face. Ahmed has said that Susan watches me sometimes, and for the most part I’ve always blown off his theory with a laugh.

  But now …

  I lean closer, until our faces are nearly as close as our hands. “It’s not that far. I’ll even bring you back in time for your homework.”

  “I really do have a quiz.” There’s a hint of regret in her voice. Her lashes are long and slightly uneven. But when she wrinkles her nose and smiles at me, I barely notice.

  Ahmed mutters something about my face cracking in two from the goofy grin on it. Susan must have heard him as well because her face grows pink. I, on the other hand, keep my attention fully focused on the girl in front of me.

  “It’s okay,” I tell Susan, trying to sound cool even though I’ve just been rejected. “Another time, then.”

  I don’t say when or prod her to set it up. It’s probably the right thing to do because she relaxes at my statement, her eyes far warmer than I’ve seen them before.

  “Okay, then,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  She turns to face the front again and I lean back into my seat with a sigh.

  Nothing fazes me for the rest of the class.

  Not when Zuric bumps up the midterm exam to a day before it was supposed to be, to a chorus of loud groans and protests.

  Not when Steve and Ahmed blow spitballs at me, point at Susan, and make kissy faces.

  Not even when Zuric unfairly puts all three of us in detention for Steve’s tone-deaf rendition of some song by the Weeknd, interrupting his last-ditch attempts to give us homework.

  * * *

  “You like her,” Steve says later, when we walk to my locker. “That Susan girl.”

  I shrug, saying nothing, instead focusing my attention on undoing the lock and pulling out the copy of King Lear that I didn’t take to class, just to annoy Zuric. Today, though, it was useless as he gave us a group assignment. I reluctantly pull out the list of essay topics he gave us last Friday. Might as well try to do something useful in detention.

  Especially with Mahtab on my case about volunteering for her latest fund-raiser—some sort of benefit concert for Syrian refugees. Another one of those flyers she designed falls out of my locker. I sigh, tempted to leave it lying there, but then pick it up again
.

  “I don’t see why you keep saying no,” my sister said irritably the night before. “Ronnie says you’re so good at presentations and talking in front of crowds! We could really use your help!”

  Used to be good at presentations, I wanted to retort. Back when I was still thirteen-year-old Malcolm and not a potential nominee for Most Detentions Served Last Year. Right now, I doubt I can string together a coherent speech, let alone convince some big-shot corporate exec to sponsor a high school concert. As for Ronnie—I want nothing to do with him. Perfect Ronnie Mehta: a fixture at school assemblies, Terry Fox Runs, and every charity event bannered by the ZCC; a shoo-in for valedictorian this year.

  While I’m not surprised that he and my sister started dating, Ronnie is seventeen, three whole years older than Mahtab. Mahtab says I’m narrow-minded and that a three-year age gap won’t make a difference in the long run. And maybe she’s right. But that doesn’t mean I have to like or trust the guy. Especially when he comes over to our house and sucks up to the old man, always talking in fast, indecipherable Gujarati, cracking jokes that go over my head.

  “Come on, stop pretending,” Steve tells me now. “I know what I saw and heard last class. ‘Feel like eating a shawarma?’” he mimics, in a voice that isn’t mine but high and squeaky.

  “She lived in Saudi Arabia. I figured she might like it.” I toss the flyer back inside and slam the locker shut.

  “So you’re like her personal Tour Guide with Benefits? Do you get a tip at the end?” He starts making kissing noises, which I ignore.

  My hand automatically goes to the gold lock that holds Susan’s locker closed. I’ve gotten used to playing with it, rotating the numbers, feeling the delicate ridges and cool metal against my skin. I don’t expect the soft click, the sudden pop of the lock against my fingers and into my hand.

  I look at the combination: 1-2-3. I frown, wondering why in the world she made it so ridiculously easy. Or maybe she doesn’t care, considering how little she uses her locker. Arthur Eldridge hasn’t had many cases of locker theft from what I know, but there have been a couple times when a wallet was taken or a necklace disappeared. And those kids had regular locks, not flimsy little gold things like this one.