by Shani Mootoo
I also met women who went by men’s names. The women wore their hair short, not as a woman might, but with an exaggeration that paralleled that of the men with women’s hair. Some of these women were well along in their process of transformation and had already had their chests reconstructed surgically. Others bound their breasts. They wore boys’ or men’s clothing, and shoes that were clearly a size or two bigger than their feet, and, regardless of their age, had the attractive awkwardness, the intriguing mix of bravado and shyness of teenaged boys. Neither the men nor the women were flamboyant like cross-dressers and transsexuals, but they moved about, at least in our sessions together, with a quiet confidence I admired. Whenever I entered the room where we gathered and I saw the ones who were no longer women but were not men either, my chest would heave, and from deep inside would well a confusion of emotions. I would be breathless with the excitement of recognition. I would want to collapse with relief at the prospect of my own change. I would feel envy and impatience that I was not further along on my own path. But I felt fear, too, that in becoming like them I would find too late that I had given up more than I had intended to, fear that there were steps on the journey that, once taken, were irreversible.
As time went by, and I was provoked by the group to become clearer and firmer about my needs, my goals and my reasons for this journey, I knew that I did not simply want to embrace within myself what some in the group called “a female masculinity.” This seemed to mean taking on the appearance and manner of boyish and masculine women, and I already fit that mould. What I felt in my very bones was that I could no longer live my life as a woman; I no longer wanted to be identified by others as a woman, and treated, as a result, in predictable and predetermined ways. It was easier to change myself than to wrestle with society. Above all, I desperately needed a kind of annihilation, and a rebirth. I did not want to stand next to a woman and feel, ever again, that I had to guard my love for her, or that I dared not touch her in public in the ways I wanted. Never again did I want to cower, or to be with a woman who in private would allow me to love her, yet in public would feel shame or fear to be seen with me. I did not want to live in a body that was scorned by men, that triggered the need in others to subdue it—to subdue me. I did not want a body that attracted hatred and brought harm to those women I cared about. A body that could not protect her. Looking back now, I realize that no one had ever asked me directly if I wanted to be a man, for I would have had to answer “no.” I remember saying, however, I could not bear the body in which I—this “I” quite separate from any body—existed. I suppose that was good enough for my peers. Perhaps many of them shared my sentiments, but our options then were black and white, between this and that. The grey area of freedom we longed for existed only in dreams. I was coaxed to dress, to negotiate streets and to engage in encounters with people as if my surgical and hormonal transformation were a fait accompli. And regardless of how strangers might have viewed me, I felt the power of this.
Even as I found strength among these people, I knew we had little in common besides the goal of physical transformation, and after a couple of unfulfilling attempts at romances with “peers,” I allowed my circle to grow smaller. My parents passed away some years later, one not too long after the other. I returned each time for their funerals. My feelings, in the end, were complex and confusing—being without parents conferred on me a new kind of aloneness. I felt, to say the very least, naked and lost and frightened, as if my parents and I had been inseparable. But lurking alongside these real and deep feelings was excitement, impatience and a blind hopefulness.
And so, one snowy morning, I made my way, walking alone, from my apartment on Bergamot Avenue to the clinic where my body’s transformation would begin. I legally changed my name from Siddhani Mahale to Sydney Mahale, knowing full well that I would—more likely than not—thereby cut myself off from all whom I had so dearly loved. I was embarking on the chance to appear on the outside as I wished myself to be inside. I would reinvent myself in my own image, on my own terms and, finally, enter a life of fulfillment.
If it weren’t for your search for me, Jonathan, you and I would not have reunited. And if, in the end, anything was fulfilled, it was not through my actions. It was because of you. Your presence in my life is the bigger part of that fulfillment. The smaller is to tell you this story.
———
It is only in writing down Sydney’s story that I have gradually understood the truth: Had he simply come straight out with an explanation or a defence delivered in distilled sentences—for instance, if he had bluntly said that our family broke up because my mother wanted a different kind of lover for herself and parent for her son—I would have heard only a string of words held together by the conventions of syntax. What would I have understood by this?
Or, had he said directly, “Ah well, Jonathan, you see I changed myself so drastically because I expected it would be easier for me to cut a path in the world with women, and love, and art exhibits and sales, and shopping for clothing, and just existing in society, and I thought that it would afford me a surer respect. I thought, that is, that it would help me to rise tall in the eyes of people like your mother,” I would certainly not have understood.
Had he explained to me that he returned to Trinidad after living in Canada for more than fifteen years because there wasn’t a soul he could ask to accompany him to the hospital, I might have granted that this hinted at something profound, and was perhaps darkly humorous, but I might also have thought that he was lacking in fortitude.
Had he taken a minute, or even a day, to share with me that he’d returned to Trinidad because the changes he made to himself had not made life easier for him but had only alienated and isolated him further, I might have thought that he was weak and cowardly. I might have been scornful.
Had he told me in a brief sentence or two about the day he lay on his bed with a fever, so sick that he couldn’t go to the drugstore to get the simplest aids such as throat lozenges and a box of NeoCitran, and decided then that it was time to return to Trinidad, I might not have wanted to hear of his isolation and might have buried myself in my writing. But then again, this might not have been a bad thing, for it has been nine years, from the day I found Sydney here in Scenery Hills, since I have been able to produce a worthwhile piece of sustained writing.
Had he told me long ago, when I first inquired about Zain’s whereabouts, that he thought he knew who had killed his best friend, I would have been horrified that he had not taken his suspicions to the police and would have insisted that he do so immediately. I would not have understood the repercussions of such an act for a person like Sid, much less the consequences of a friendship with a person like Sid for a woman like Zain. I would not have understood that, even in death, Sydney wanted to preserve Zain’s good name and that of her family.
Sydney knew that I had to hear all of the stories, in a seemingly digressive way, for any to make sense in the end. But more than this, Sydney knew what I myself did not, not then: that in my presence he was on trial. He cared enough, I understand now, to give me through his stories every nuance of evidence so that I would make my judgement fairly.
4
By nighttime, Sydney could only whisper, but his memories burned bright. He had talked, stopped and seemed to reflect, and then carried on in little spurts, for hours. It was clear—and fair enough, I suppose—that there were things he kept to himself, but still, a fuller picture of this storyteller who had once been my other mother had emerged. When he was satisfied that he had told me all that he had wanted me to know, his breathing became shallow. He no longer asked that I hold off from calling for help.
He was in the hospital for three days. I spent most of my time there, returning to the house only twice to wash and change.
Rosita came to the hospital at mealtimes and returned to the house in between. The first time she visited she brought Sydney and me a breakfast of rotis wrapped in tea cloths and a dish of potatoes she’d fried
with onions and cumin. She brought the good plates, knives, forks and glasses and orange juice she had herself made that very morning. She set it all out as if we were at a picnic and announced, “No sugar in anything.” Sydney seemed pleased. We both ate, I shyly but with much appreciation, the aroma of the potato dish enveloping us, making a family of the three of us in the sterile room.
Afterwards, Rosita was gently persuaded by a nurse that the hospital would provide Sydney’s meals according to the in-house nutritionist’s recommendations. Pique flickered across Rosita’s face, but only those of us who knew her saw it. It was Sydney’s kindness to her that he refused to allow the nurses to help him with his food and drink, and it was Rosita who from then on fed him. She quarrelled, naturally, about what she saw as scandalous ineptitude on the part of the hospital’s cook. “This hospital don’t have a cook. Whoever make this food is no cook. This food tasteless for so. How they expect people to get better eating so?” she muttered. I humoured her, saying that it was probably meant to encourage patients to get well so that they could get out of there fast.
Sydney was happy with the attention and company. Between him and me there existed a new closeness. He had bared himself to me the previous day, but I held no power over him. Although he was the one who had done the talking, his divulgences had the effect of making me equally vulnerable before him.
Sydney was a novelty at the hospital. Nurses, including ones who were not assigned to his care, came into the room. They gawked at him. And I saw them watching me too. From their awkwardness and uneasy half-smiles, I imagined they were curious about my relationship to this Indian-Trinidadian man who had once been a woman. Questions, however, were not directly put forward, except when one nurse asked, “You know him good, eh?” I offered that nurse no other explanation than my own half-smile. More than once I heard a snicker from a nurse or a doctor in the corridor outside Sydney’s room, or the tail end of laughter, and worried that it was at Sydney’s expense. But when I thought about going out and confronting the situation I realized that I wasn’t one hundred percent certain the laughter was directed at Sydney. I had never cried “prejudice” before and certainly didn’t have evidence or the vocabulary to make a convincing case for the accusation. I considered simply stepping into the corridor outside the room, standing there with my arms crossed and a stern face, but I decided that I might alienate those who could have an effect on Sydney’s health and life. Still, I cannot deny that I felt some shame and confusion about what he—or should that be she—had done to his—or her—body, despite all that he had so recently told me. In time, the jeering ceased. Or perhaps I simply stopped listening to it.
The first morning at the hospital, after Rosita returned to the house, I was touched when Sydney, still weak but able to sit up a few minutes at a time, asked if I would shave him. I had not touched his face since I was a child. In fact, I had never before touched “his” face. I set a small basin of cool water on a trolley, alongside a towel and a thin lavender washcloth, a can of shaving cream, a disposable Bic and a small bottle of bayleaf-scented aftershave lotion, all brought to the room, on request, by a nurse—and I began. I cupped his face in my hand and thought of Zain. I held him by his jaw to turn his head. How Zain must have loved Sid. She might not have called it “love,” but she must have felt it. How could she not? The scent of the fried cumin and the onions from breakfast that had mixed with the usual hospital smells were obliterated by the astringently sterile, yet oddly reassuring fragrance of shaving cream. I lathered Sydney’s face, perhaps more than was necessary, with the tips of my fingers, stealing all the time—from the past, the present and the future—that the sense of touch, burdened with such a task, might grant, and perhaps it was only my wishful imagination, but I believe I felt the old familiar bones beneath his skin. I felt the weight of what he had shared with me the day before, and the weight of his life. As I pulled the Bic up his neck—here he raised his head, exposing it for me—I felt a purer love for this man than I had known before. Throughout the time I shaved him, no less than four nurses stopped by to watch. And now, months later, it is the coolness of his skin, the contouring of his face, the sudden, not-too-late, somatic intimacy that stays with me.
That day, Sydney asked me if I would be so good as to make sure that there was food in the house so that Rosita could cook proper meals for those of us there. My job was simply to check with Rosita, and I was to give Sankar money—he told me where I would find it—for whatever was needed and to send him to fetch it. On two occasions over the next day and a half, when Rosita, Lancelot and Sankar came to the hospital, Sydney asked me to pass him his bag, took out a few dollar bills and requested I go to the hospital’s cafeteria to purchase Solo soft drinks and a package of Teatime tea biscuits for them. I was moved, realizing that he was in sickness as he had always been in health.
Doctors came and went. Sydney was wheeled away for X-rays and an ultrasound, and after each interminable time he was wheeled back to his room, where I waited. Nurses came and went too, and I believe that over time they warmed to us. One doctor, a small black man with tortoiseshell glasses, called me into the hallway outside the room and asked what my relationship to Sydney was. I fumbled before telling the white lie that Sydney had been like a father to me from the day I was born. In the fraction of a second that he considered my answer, I prepared myself for what might come: curiosity, argument, lectures, opinions and judgements. I was ready now to fight. But when the doctor spoke, it was to inform me that there was pneumonia in Sydney’s lungs, that this was the main problem, the priority. He reassured me that Sydney was strong, Sydney was stubborn, and it was only a matter of time before the tablets worked.
I was as momentarily relieved at this news as I was gradually disheartened. I wanted to believe the doctor, but couldn’t shake the idea that I knew better. How was it that I, but not the doctors, could see that there was little chance he would recover? I had heard somewhere—perhaps I’d read it in novels, or seen it in movies, or had heard from friends who knew first-hand—that when an older person or sickly person contracted pneumonia it was usually that, and not the primary illness, that did them in. Looking back, I feel a gnawing guilt: had I, on hearing that it was pneumonia, become so afraid that I weakened both our wills?
During the hospital’s visiting hours that evening, two men, one with heavily kohl-lined eyes, the other wearing a loose, light scarf around his neck, his right-hand pinkie fingernail long and painted the colour of a wet cherry lozenge, visited Sydney. As ill as he was, Sydney was pleased to see them. I had not met any of his friends before and was moved by the graciousness the three men exhibited towards one another. Beyond his greeting, Sydney said no more than a word or two. The strain of doing even this was evident. The two men tried not to expose to him how ill they saw him to be. They chatted as if they were paying him a visit on his veranda in Scenery Hills, including Sydney in their conversation by looking at him as they spoke, one making comments and posing questions, as if directly to Sydney, the other answering as if for Sydney, the two sounding as if they were three. The one with the kohl-lined eyes went to Sydney, pulled a little black plastic comb from a bag draped on his shoulder and arranged Sydney’s thinned hair. The man rested the tips of his fingers under Sydney’s chin, lifting Sydney’s face a fraction to take a good look. He licked the tip of one of his ring fingers and ran it across Sydney’s eyebrows. He appraised Sydney again. He said, “You’re as handsome as ever, my dear man. Nothing can take that away from you—isn’t that so?” The other answered in the affirmative. Who could not have been pleased at Sydney’s smile, weak as it was, at this show of attentiveness? When I saw that they were ready to leave—the painted-pinkie one had kissed Sydney softly on his lips—I exited the room to allow the three some minutes alone. In the corridor I asked, doing my best not to impart too impolite a curiosity, how they knew Sydney. The one with the kohl-lined eyes replied that they had all attended the same health clinic. I reflected on how Rosita had taken it u
pon herself more than once to telephone Sydney’s sister to inform her of Sydney’s turn, but was told each time by the housekeeper that Gita was unavailable. These two men, then, were Sydney’s only visitors.
Their visit had a decidedly buoying effect on Sydney. For some hours I entertained a false hope of his recovery, and when with a strong voice he started to speak again of the day he had walked to the Irene Samuel, I anxiously listened as if it were the first I had ever heard of this walk. I listened, too, for signs that he was mentally competent, that he was regaining his health on all fronts.
But once this bout of storytelling was over, the end was all too swift. Time seemed to stand still and race at once. It was unbearable, by nighttime, to watch the man who had regaled me with his stories sunken against the bed, vulnerable under the pale blue cotton sheets, unable now to whisper without pain. He uttered single words, water, breathe, chest, light, nurse, and he said my name, not always to alert me to his wishes, for sometimes when I answered, he looked for a few seconds into my eyes and then shut his. Eventually I reclined, as best as I could, in an armchair that was kindly brought by an orderly for me, and, to my surprise and shame, more exhausted than I realized, I slept through the night.
