by Shani Mootoo
ALSO BY SHANI MOOTOO
FICTION
Out on Main Street
Cereus Blooms at Night
He Drown She in the Sea
Valmilki’s Daughter
POETRY
The Predicament of Or
Copyright © 2014 Shani Mootoo
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mootoo, Shani, 1957-
Moving forward sideways, like a crab / Shani Mootoo.
ISBN 978-0-385-67622-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-67623-6
I. Title.
PS8576.O622M68 2013 C813′.54 C2012-906600-1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Jennifer Lum
Cover image: Cindy Patrick Photography
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
For Deborah
who reminds me always that while time is an
unparalleled gift, time to think is the truest luxury.
For Indra Mootoo (1936–2010)
and
for Frankie (1999–2013)
“If you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it,
you don’t like what you find either. Now, running
to a thing, that’s a different matter …”
—Uncle Axel to David, The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
CONTENTS
—
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
FROM SYDNEY’S NOTEBOOK
MOVING FORWARD SIDEWAYS LIKE A CRAB
A Memoir by Jonathan Lewis-Adey
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Acknowledgements
FROM SYDNEY’S NOTEBOOK
Surely it is a failure of our human design that it takes not an hour, not a day, but much, much longer to relay what flashes through the mind with the speed of a hummingbird’s wing.
There is so little time left now, and what Jonathan wants to know and I to say are not the same.
I realize Jonathan is a grown man and can surely take whatever words I offer him, but what good would come of it if I were to tell him how, ten years into my relationship with his mother, India, she informed me that I was a disappointment? I would not want to encourage him to consider this, lest in doing so he concur.
Nor does he need to know that there was a time after his mother and I first met, in those months before he was born, when India would ask after our lovemaking, “How did you know to do that?” Does he need to know that she gripped my shoulders and trembled?
Or, should he know? I wonder if he would believe it.
He certainly doesn’t need to know that after his birth, India and I grew cool with each other. And yet, nearly ten years later when we broke apart, I hadn’t stopped loving her. Should he know that? He would likely scoff at this pathetic admission. It might even appall him.
After India and I first met, in the months before I moved into her house I saw my physical upkeep as part of a daily drama between her and me, and I made a job of keeping my body trim and groomed, my clothing and sheets washed and pressed, my shoes polished, my kitchen and bathroom clean and tidy, wine in the fridge and chocolate on my bedside table.
Ten years later, the list of what, it turned out, I was inept at doing included: putting up shelving in her office; organizing and cleaning the parts of the house where Jonathan and I spent time; enjoying myself—or at least, giving the appearance of such—at parties thrown by her publisher and by various literary festivals. I didn’t make well enough of myself as an artist to be recognized by her peers. I failed to take Jonathan away often enough or long enough that she could have time to write. I indulged Jonathan too much.
My rendition of our rupture is, of course, one-sided, perhaps a little flippant, the rewriting of cold facts encouraged by time and distance. I once asked her, “And you and me?” To which her response was a gesture of her hand towards and down the length of my body, a delicate non-verbalization of waning desire. After this, the relationship could not be sustained. It was India who spoke the words first, and a short time later, declaring the obvious was as good as insisting upon it. Over the course of a few months we became territorial, keeping our belongings, our agendas, our thoughts to ourselves.
Then one day, I came home to find Charlie Bream standing in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. I couldn’t see India, but knew she was in the kitchen. Bream was almost as tall as the height of the doorway. He wore the whitest dress shirt I’d ever seen, long sleeves rolled just below his elbow, and grey wool trousers. He turned and, although I had never met him before, greeted me as if he and I were old buddies. I sat on the bench in the hallway taking much longer to remove my shoes than was necessary. Bream’s trousers were thick and heavy, and a black leather belt hugged him just below his waist. His black cap-toe oxfords with their blond inserts were neatly placed on the shoe mat. They were made in Italy. Size 44. One notices everything in such an instant. From where I sat I could smell Bream’s cologne. India, who in the ten years we had lived together would not boil an egg, was grilling croissants with ham and cheese. I was offered one, but declined and went upstairs to Jonathan’s room. There, I waited for Bream to leave. I lay on Jonathan’s bed and looked down the length of my own body. I had indeed “let myself go.” I could hear Bream’s voice, and India’s. They spoke evenly and at a normal volume, which seemed as brazen as if they had been whispering.
Charlie Bream didn’t last, and he was not, it turned out, one of India’s more memorable encounters. But whenever I think of that time, I see in my mind an image of Charlie Bream in the doorway of the kitchen, and his shoes, made in Italy, size 44, on the mat in the entrance.
I could not bear to say goodbye to Jonathan and so I did not. India warned me not to try to fight her for any rights to Jonathan. As an immigrant, as a non-wage-earning person and, most importantly, as a person without her connections, I would, she assured me, lose in every way. Yet for some time I did fight her, not to match her callousness nor for the principle of the thing, but for the love of the boy I had raised. His needs were the structure around which my days had been built. But that was a time when someone in my position had no legal recourse. India was right; I was outmatched. The irony is that it was Jonathan himself who was at the heart of our tug-of-war, and soon I was no longer willing to put him through our struggle.
After I left, I discovered that it was not only Jonatha
n I missed. India used to rub herself, after she’d showered, with rose oil. Its scent would waft into our bedroom. Even after I had returned to Trinidad I would be taken hostage by this scent rising up out of nowhere. Sometimes, I imagined I saw, in my peripheral vision, piles of folded laundry waiting to be put away: Jonathan’s little shirts and trousers, his underwear and T-shirts, India’s black V-neck Ts, her black skirts, her black underwear, her black jersey dresses, my blue jeans and black T-shirts, and the detergent scent of mountain air would fill my nostrils. I would turn my head quickly to find that I had been tricked by a pile of books, or simply by regret.
In the end, these are not the incidents and reflections I want to leave with Jonathan. And perhaps what he wants to know is something else, something more personal too.
I suppose I could explain to him that I came to realize that the imagining and dreaming, the wishing and the knowing that led bit by bit to the being I am today had actually started long before I left Trinidad and went to live in Canada. Long before I met his mother. Long before he came into my life. How I have tried in the past to tell him—to tell him about Zain, that is—but he can’t seem to take it in. Now I must explain it to him one more time—how on that particular day in my childhood when I was in the classroom at the new secondary school to which I had transferred, a student I had just met, this Muslim girl named Zain, pinched my arm. How I grabbed her wrist and told her to stop. But it was too late. I had already felt the strange mix of power and fear that would haunt me forever. Perhaps that was why, upon finishing high school, I left Trinidad and immigrated to Toronto.
Granted, I never told him that on one of my visits back to Trinidad not long after I had parted with India, Zain and I were sitting on the sill of her swimming pool, eating codfish balls and drinking lime juice—she by then an adult married woman and mother of two in a yellow-and-white two-piece bathing suit; I, the same age but feeling like some undecided, half-formed thing in my T-shirt and shorts; both our pairs of feet swinging beneath the surface of the water—and I told her in a rush about how one had to undergo psychiatric reviews to transform one’s self in the ways I’d just begun to think about, and that only if it were determined that one’s mental health was compromised would the insurance pay for what was needed. Zain was quiet for a while. Then, as she slid into the water, she said, “That’s a shame, because there isn’t anything crazy about you.” She swam off and dipped under the water. Up came her feet, toes pointed at the sky. She stayed like that for a good minute.
I could tell Jonathan how a couple years later, during another visit, Zain pressed into my hand an envelope bulging with American hundred-dollar bills that, ever since that conversation beside the pool, she had been saving.
And some time after that gesture, I could say, I arrived one cold and snowy morning at a building in Toronto, entered a room at an appointed time with a bag full of cash and changed my life forever. And I could leave it at that. Perhaps these are the stories that would satisfy Jonathan. But they are only a fraction of the truth, and I need to tell him the rest. I need to tell him how I have battled with the belief that had I only been a different person, Zain would be alive today. Had I been a different person. This, more than anything, is what needs to be said. Still, that would be only a fraction of the story.
In the end, I hope that Jonathan will understand why, after coming to Canada in search of some sort of authenticity, after living in Toronto for more than three decades, I returned home—I returned, that is, to live again in Trinidad. But how do I explain it so that he doesn’t think I ran away, gave up, failed?
One more chance is all I ask for. But time is against me, and there is so much to tell.
MOVING FORWARD SIDEWAYS LIKE A CRAB
A Memoir
By Jonathan Lewis-Adey
PART ONE
1
It amuses me how the instant the fasten-seatbelts sign is turned off during the flight from Toronto to Port of Spain, Trinidadians get up and strut about. They seem to know one another; they congregate in the aisles unabashedly airing their business, telling jokes, heckling each other or reminiscing. Their anticipation is palpable. Some begin the journey as strangers, but through conversations struck up in the interminable lineups at the airport or during the five-hour flight itself, they inevitably learn that they know someone in common, or are even related. I have always envied their ease and willing camaraderie, and having been to their island numerous times over the past decade, have often wanted to contribute my penny’s worth; but discretion—on account of being just a visitor to the island—has prevailed.
On the approach to Trinidad, as the plane comes in from the Caribbean Sea towards the dense blue of the Northern Range—where there is always the surprise of mountainside villages comprising three or four houses glimpsed through the clouds—another sign of anticipation occurs: passengers lower their voices and withdraw into more private preoccupations. Once the mountains are achieved, there is silence on board. The hub of Port of Spain suddenly appears and I take pleasure in being able to spot the Queen’s Park Savannah, the NETT Building and the Lapeyrouse Cemetery before the plane heads out over the sea again, over the Gulf of Paria, where it circles into position to glide in to the airport, first over the Caroni Swamp and then over the fertile belly of the Caroni Plains.
Is it already two months since that last flight down? Although I could not have imagined then the full extent of what lay in store for me, I sensed that my life was on the verge of another of its ruptures, and I feared that this was, perhaps, to be my final trip here. And so I did not merely observe the passengers, as had been my habit since my first trip here almost a decade ago (my first trip as an adult, that is; the very first happened some thirty years ago when I was a child), and neither did I merely watch the view from the plane window; this time I tried to ensnare in my mind every detail of all that went on around me and all that passed outside the window. As we headed over the plains to the airport, I savoured the sight of the bamboo-lined, snaking Caroni River and, on either side of it, the farmers’ houses sitting amidst remnants of cane fields, and the pigeon pea plots and the black-water rice paddies our reflection sailed across.
The usual pleasure of a visit to the island was tainted this time by apprehension, and so naturally I recalled the first time I had come here looking for Sid. After years without a clue as to Sid’s whereabouts, Internet technology had put at my fingertips the means to realize my dream of finding the parent who had deserted my mother and me when I was ten years old. Resentment at having been dropped so flatly had plagued me since that time. In junior high school I had attempted to register my unhappiness: I’d failed at every subject save for Art and English Literature and Composition, and had embarked on a path of delinquency that included smoking at home and on the school grounds, skipping school, not doing homework—to name the most benign of my transgressions. One might say that I had no imagination when, in order to escape being at home with my mother, I hid away in the reading booths at the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge Street. But there in the booths I lost myself in chronicling my longings and grievances in a notebook. The school psychologist, with whom I was now well acquainted, encouraged me to show him the notebook, and it was with his sustained provocation and encouragement that I began in earnest to turn the facts of my early life into short fictional narratives and poems.
For years, well past high school, I managed to keep from my mother any knowledge of this scribbling, or the fact that it had become a passion. I did not attend university, but found instead a job as a clerk in a health-food store on Bloor Street at Spadina. This seemed to both please and unsettle my mother, but still I kept from her what I thought of as my real work. When I eventually signed a contract for my first book with her publisher, it was without her knowledge. I will never be sure that the publisher was not simply doing her a favour when he took me on. Perhaps, too, he might have thought that investing in the work of the son of one of his most successful authors made good business sen
se. My mother received news of that first book’s release with undisguised consternation. She read the novel in one sitting. I waited for her response, ostrich-like, hoping that she would ignore the autobiographical nature of the work and see only the craft. The instant I saw her face, I knew that there would be little conversation about the book. I was right. “Oh, Joji, get over it, will you? Please,” was all she said. Nevertheless, over the course of some years, two more books followed. On reading the second, India said, “You’re not at all a bad writer, but you’re repeating yourself.”
I can’t deny that with each book’s publication I hoped that hype about them would attract Sid’s attention. If Sid were to read any of my works, my thoughts went, she would surely find in them reflections of our past life together and my present longing, and would contact me and our reconciliation would happen. But no such thing occurred, and to make matters more unbearable, my books were not much of a success. Nevertheless, my publisher—my mother’s publisher, I remind myself—maintained an interest in me. Pressed to present a new manuscript for his consideration, I tried for years, in vain, to come up with stories and themes that veered away from my personal experiences. When I realized I couldn’t write any more, or so it appeared, I sank into a long depression during which there were periods when I pointed squarely at Sid’s cold-hearted departure for what I saw as my failures. I took to hiding out again at the Reference Library, my laptop computer, unused now for word processing, the gateway out of my morass. And it was in this way that my depression and bitterness were reshaped, at the computer, into the hope of reconciliation—if not between Sid and my mother, then at least between Sid and me—and my search became an obsession. I imagined daily what it would be like if and when Sid and I were reacquainted.
The reality was not quite so swift or easy. Over the course of several years I typed the name “Sid Mahale” into the Google search box and found that while there were quite a few Sid Mahales in the world, none jumped out as immediate possibilities. Images that appeared beside that name were interesting but useless: a book that did not have any clear relationship to the name; photos of parklands, flowers, dogs. There was one image of a pyramid-shaped bottle of perfume, one of a pile of burning car tires and a few of the banks of the River Ganges.
