Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  I would always listen with half an ear cocked for reflections on our family, longing to hear mention of me, some indication that in all the years after he’d gone away I had remained in his thoughts. And I cannot deny that this last time I was, again, hopeful that what Sydney hadn’t finished saying, and now needed so desperately to say, concerned his relationship with me. I expected, too, that he would tell me immediately what was on his mind, but instead he asked me to take him into the dining room as it was dinnertime and he had asked Rosita to welcome me back with her stewed pork and red beans. Although he himself had no appetite and would not eat, he sat at the table with me. I was too worried about his condition to appreciate the meal. I had the good sense, however, to make some noise about how good it was, how touched I was that it had been made for me. I kept hoping that he’d begin to tell me whatever it was that was so urgent, but perhaps Rosita hovering in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room—a sign of her anxiety about his health—inhibited him. I helped him into his bed shortly after, worried that perhaps the right time had passed, or perhaps it simply had not come at all, and never would. But at just that moment, thankfully, he asked me to sit on the edge of the bed and stay with him a while.

  He began—to my immense disappointment—by saying: Jonathan, you know that morning I told you about, when I walked in the snowstorm to the Irene Samuel Health and Gender Centre in Toronto? My heart that day was so heavy. There was no one with me, you know. There was all this snow and ice on the road, and as I’ve told you, there was that dreadful-dreadful wind, but I insisted on walking there. There were cabs about, but I wouldn’t hail any of them. He laughed then and said, I didn’t even want the company of a taxi driver.

  My heart sank. Sydney was repeating—yet again—the story of that walk. Surely, I thought, he did not have the energy to embark on such a story, and I worried that precious moments were passing. I interrupted him, doing my best to reassure him that while I was always keen to hear that particular story, perhaps he ought to first tell me whatever was most pressing. He sighed and said, Listen, Jonathan, this is what I want to tell you about. I have never told you how that walk ended. But this time I must tell you. I must tell you all of it.

  In my head—trapped there, thankfully—growled a rather loud voice: All right; then tell me again if you must, but, for the love of God, please also tell me why you left our family.

  Sydney and I stared at each other. Then, as if he knew my mind, he said, Perhaps, Jonathan, you’ve been looking for simple explanations. But there is hardly ever a single answer to anything. And isn’t it so that the stories one most needs to know are the ones that are usually the least simple or straightforward?

  Sydney spoke in a soft voice, calculating his words. Contradictions are inevitable, he continued. You listening to my story is yet another angle; my story is incomplete, you see, Jonathan, without your interpretation—over which I have little control. No matter my noblest intentions, and no matter how detailed my accounts, you may still only catch a fraction of what I say. You must trust that in the story I will tell you tonight—God willing—is contained all you’ve wanted to know.

  The writer in me understood, in a flash. I was silent then, and I listened. And Sydney spoke slowly yet evenly into the early hours of the morning.

  He insisted on beginning with the winter walk and carried on as if there had been no interruption, and as if it had been an account he had rehearsed: As I was saying, he said, there were cabs coming and going, but I did not avail myself of them. There I was, in the cold, wet whiteness of that snowy morning, struggling against everything. As I walked along Shuter Street, I would have liked to hear a monkey howl. That morning I would have liked to hear the chug of a pirogue, a steel pan being played, cricket commentary coming from another immigrant’s transistor radio balanced on his or her shoulder. As I trudged on the ice in Regent Park that morning, I imagined the blue stillness of the Tucker Valley in the Chaguaramas foothills. I was transported for a moment, thinking I heard kiskadees calling out to one another. And this is how it has always been: over there I thought constantly of here; but now, look—I am lying here in this heat, in this house, the tepid, salty Gulf just yards away from us, sick as a dog, and of what do I speak? Of walking in the snow one dark, frigid morning a quarter century ago. But how it pleases me to do so. I am recalling the rumble of a faraway city, the frenetic howls of ambulances and police cars, of fire trucks roaring down the Don Valley Parkway and heard even in winter when the windows and the balcony door in my third-floor studio apartment on Bergamot Avenue were sealed against cold and wind and wet. In the tropical comfort of a bedroom in Scenery Hills, with the whistles of frogs and cicadas in the background, the sound of boats chugging through the night, how clearly I hear the sizzle and hum that came from the light of the street lamp outside the building on Bergamot Avenue. I can see, in the light’s yellowish pink shaft, exotic downy feathers of snow.

  Then, to my surprise, Sydney began to speak of his friend Zain.

  If I could have asked someone to accompany me to the Irene Samuel, it would have been Zain, he said. But of course, that was impossible. So I did the next best thing, and in the knapsack I wore that day I placed all the letters she had ever written to me. It was as if she were with me.

  My mind, confounded by this turn in his tale, drifted as he spoke, and I recalled the first time Sydney had told me of this friend years ago. The sounds of the sea were a constant backdrop whenever Sydney and I were in the garden or here inside the house, and my recollections of first learning of Zain were full of those kinds of sounds—a car gearing up or wheezing on the brake as it went down the hilly road, a lone steel drum tinkling in practice somewhere nearby, a dog, or a chorus of them, barking. But that day I did not hear Lancelot and Rosita’s chatter and bickering coming from inside the house, and I noticed their absence. It was midmorning—perhaps the third or fourth visit I’d made to Trinidad. I knocked on Sydney’s bedroom door. There was no answer so I knocked again, and then opened the door just a crack to make sure that he was all right.

  The windows were wide open, the ends of the tied-back curtains whipping up in the breeze. Coming from the other side of the street was the erratic whirr of a weed trimmer. A cool pleasant light washed the sparse room. Sydney was lying on top of the made-up double bed in red boxer shorts and a teal tank top that hugged his heavy torso, which starkly contrasted with his frail legs. He was reading a letter. I called to him, and finally he acknowledged my presence. He gestured me into the room and folded the letter. A green knapsack lay off to the side. Scattered around Sydney were several greeting cards, letters on formal writing paper, an uneven stack of torn bits of paper held together by a paper clip. He had been shaved and his skin was a light powdery grey. He hadn’t had his midmorning nap, it seemed. I asked how he was feeling, to which he replied, with a tone of futility, that he was as good as could be expected. I asked if he’d taken his medications, to which he merely nodded. I glanced at the correspondence, feeling awkward about my intrusion. Letters from a friend, he said, as if I’d asked.

  He gathered the scraps. These are the first ones she wrote me, he said.

  I was a grown man, but transparent as a child to Sydney. He had spotted the flicker of curiosity in me, and commented, No, no; it’s not like that, Jonathan. There was never a romance between my friend—Zain is her name—and me. Zain and I were, however, the very best, the closest of friends.

  I felt these words with a prickle of jealousy as acute as if I, and not my mother, had been his lover. Seconds later, he elaborated in a fashion that unsettled me again, as if I were a pebble caught in the push and pull of small quarrelsome waves at the water’s edge. In a way, Sydney said, it was better than a romance.

  The letters, now part of his legacy to me, were written with a fountain pen, in ink that had turned a purplish brown. None were dated. I remember his voice as he read snippets from them aloud, one after the other.

  Dear Sid,

  Where
are you? Why aren’t you at school today? I’m not saying you are missed, so don’t get a fat head. It’s just that there is nobody to provide me with my much-needed quota of comic relief. This note—which, stupidly, you will only get when you return—is just to let you know that I am doing the job Miss Augusta saddled me with—looking after rejects from other schools. I’m getting to like it. Gives me a glimpse of my potential.

  Dear Sid,

  It was Eid yesterday. I brought you seiwine from home—my mother’s own. Bet your mother can’t make seiwine, can she? Your loss. The other Hindus, Moonsie and Bhags, enjoyed it. Zain

  Dear Sid,

  If you’d like—and I do think you should like, even if only for the seiwine—to become a Muslim I can introduce you to our Imam. He won’t hold the fact that you are still a Hindu against you. We know our ancestors were once too. Choice and power. You too have it.

  Z

  As I recalled the substance of those letters, I was brought back to the present by Sydney’s voice saying that Zain had never experienced winter, and that he’d always wished she’d had the chance to live abroad, on her own. Sydney imitated Zain, “But, you are brave!” I was impressed that in his condition, even as his voice shook and the effort came with some hesitation, he had the energy to imitate the high-pitched soft and musical accent. “But, Sid, how you could live in a place like that?” he mimicked, and followed with an explanation for my benefit that “living in a place like that” meant a place where it snowed, and where for almost half the year you had to have your arms and legs and feet covered because it was too damn cold. “A place like that,” he said, meant a country where one didn’t have the kind of family connections common in Trinidad. In Trinidad, friends of your cousins’ cousins’ in-laws accorded you the same treatment as if you were related to them by blood, as if you were a brother or a sister—meaning that other concerns would immediately be put aside, without question, if you called in a moment of need. Whereas, he continued, in “a place like that,” friends passing your home wouldn’t dream of stopping in just to say hello because such a visit hadn’t been pre-arranged. It was a place where you didn’t know the names of your neighbours and couldn’t ring them up and ask them to drive you here or there. To someone like Zain, being able to live in “a place like that” was a testament to Sid’s mettle. I was pleased when Sydney added, But you have been here often enough, Jonathan. Surely you know these things by now.

  He was on a roll, on a subject that interested me, for I had spent the first decade of my life with one parent who had little time for me, and another—this one—who’d dropped everything to attend to my slightest murmur. In my years of coming to Trinidad to visit Sydney, I had often wished people around me were not quite so attuned to my every need, while on returning to Canada I missed and longed for that same attentiveness.

  I asked Sydney what he meant by the phrase “someone like Zain.” He paused, then said: Someone who hadn’t tried to make him into who he wasn’t, but rather helped him to become who he already was.

  That night, Sydney told me that throughout his thirty years in Canada the same thought had come to him every winter as the mercury plummeted and the snow descended, outlining the weathervane on the balcony. I would think, he said, how I wished that my dear friend Zain—and how I wished, too, that my dear mother, my dear father, my high school teachers and all of my classmates, my gynecologist in Trinidad, even my dentist, not to speak of the women who one day delighted in what they called my boyishness and the next whispered disparagingly about it, and especially the men whose eyes hardened and lips curled when I didn’t field their flatteries and advances—how I wished these and numerous other people could have seen me negotiate Toronto’s icy pavements while the wind drilled painfully into my forehead, or battle the two blocks to the streetcar in a whiteout, or seen me trudge home in ankle-deep snow carrying heavy bags of groceries. Living in Canada, Sydney said, with its complicated protocols and rules of conduct, is a test indeed to the mettle of anyone who arrives there from a tropical country, indeed anyone from anywhere who lands there with more determination than credentials. Being able to survive in a country like that is a recommendation of all who arrive with the earnest intention to become a grander person than would have been possible had they remained elsewhere, of all who come despite the fear that it will be a feat to achieve anything at all without the structure of culture and family, without the armour of one’s connections. You found out in no time, Sydney said, that the clout your good name carried back home in the village, or on the entire island of Trinidad—an island that could easily be tucked into a bay in Lake Ontario—was useless there. My own negotiation of Toronto, Sydney told me, was indeed a testament to my mettle, and Zain, who one summer visited Toronto especially to see me, acknowledged this. She stayed for a week in my bachelor apartment, and drove about the city in my nineteen-year-old second-hand car whose body had been rusted by the salt used on the roads in the winter to melt snow. She told me—I who had known nothing of life’s hardships before leaving Trinidad—that I had indeed taken the harder way, and that she admired and even envied me for this.

  I was moved by the surge in Sydney’s energy as he spoke. His voice grew steadily stronger. It was as if a force rose out of him and he was determined to once and for all relate his story.

  On returning to Trinidad, Zain had gone to see Sid’s parents. She thought she was telling them of Sid’s courage when she said that it was quite something to see Siddhani Mahale, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Mahale, living in a rented bachelor apartment in a rough part of the city and driving an old rusted car. Mrs. Mahale immediately called Sid, but not to commiserate. Instead, she delivered a lecture on how she herself had lived through seven winters in Ireland when Sid’s father was in medical college there, how a little adversity never hurt anyone. If she, who had been thoroughly spoiled by the comforts and privilege of an old and grand business family, could do it, then anyone could. The real shame, said Mrs. Mahale, was that Siddhani had friends calling them up to tell them of the conditions their child was living in, as if it were their fault.

  Of course Sid hadn’t asked Zain to mention the conditions in which she lived, and wasn’t at all pleased that she’d done so, but her mother’s response enraged and saddened her. The gulf that existed between Sid and her parents—on account of her inability and refusal to conform to their idea of what a good daughter was—widened. On hearing about Mrs. Mahale’s retort to Sid, Zain wasn’t slow to add her own: that Mrs. Mahale, while in Ireland, had a husband at her side and the knowledge that she would soon return to Trinidad, and that when she did it would be to live the favoured life of a doctor’s wife. Perhaps adversity was good, Zain remarked, but only if it didn’t kill you first.

  After Sydney reported this to me, he became wistful. He closed his eyes. It was already past nine-thirty, quite late for him. I waited for what seemed like an eternity, and tried to suppress the disappointment that had again begun to swell in me. A voice in my head grumbled, So are you going to sleep now? Is that all you have so needed to tell me? Is that what you so revved yourself up to say? That life in Toronto was difficult? I was suddenly angry. Are you assuming, I silently glowered, that from this I would see why our family was destroyed, why you went and did this to yourself?

  I made a gesture to get up when, to my relief, Sid began speaking again, and contrarily, I found that it didn’t matter that he again told me about Zain. As long as he kept speaking, I could hope for illumination.

  Sydney said, sadly: In the end, Zain was the one who was brave. You see, she didn’t leave home, Jonathan. She remained right here in Trinidad. Right here, spinning her top in the mud of all that was steady, familiar, and expected of her. That is, I see now, what true courage is. His fist landed on the bed with a thump of admiration.

  When I lived in Toronto, he said, I used to write to Zain here in Trinidad and tell her how I missed “home”—missed Trinidad, that is. Zain would chide me over the phone for being a “no-whe
reian.” She would say to me, You made your choice, so forget about this place when you’re over there.

  What choice did I make? I asked. I had no choice.

  We’d be having a good tiff by this time. She emphasized the word always when she said that one always has a choice. Whatever action you took, she said, that was the choice you made. I replied that quite often one’s choices were limited by society’s expectations, and that sometimes choices were made for you by others. She raised her voice at me. It doesn’t matter how the choice was made, she shouted, it’s where you are right now that matters, so for God’s sake, Sid, get on with it. She had; she’d got on with it, she said. She’d applied to the university in Trinidad and studied there. She’d married a Trinidadian man, and having done that, she’d built a business with him, she’d had a family with him. They’d built their own house, they’d joined clubs, they went out to parties and they entertained at home. Return to Trinidad, she said, or forget about Trinidad and settle down in Toronto once and for all. You can’t live in two places at once—it’s like having two lovers, she said. You’re bound to be unfaithful to both.