Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  Dear Sid,

  It’s been three days since you left, and I know it takes longer than that for a letter to arrive, but I can’t wait to hear from you. What is Canada like? It’s cold, of course, but how cold? Have you seen snow yet? Have you met any other Trinidadians? I am so worried that you are going to replace me overnight. I can’t believe you’re starting university, and I will now be a year behind you. I wish I didn’t have to work this year.

  Angus comes over almost every day after his work. Mum has dinner ready for him now when he arrives. I don’t know how I feel about that. Sometimes proud, sometimes like she’s pushing my family on him. Dad still doesn’t talk to him much, but he doesn’t take his eyes off him either. They still won’t let me go out with him, except to buy corn up the hill, or for coconuts in town, and then we have to be right back. Angus said he will convert to the Muslim faith if that is what it takes (you might remember that he is R.C.). Sometimes I am so in love with him, and then there are strange moments when I don’t have a clue what love is. Sometimes it’s like something in an advertisement, and if you have it, or if you give it, then you’re very cool and have a lot of prestige. If you don’t have it, or if you don’t give it, you’re a failure. Everybody is supposed to get married, so I suppose I will one day too, and Angus isn’t a bad fellow. He is applying to go to university next year. Mum knows this, but not Dad.

  OK, I want to tell you something—I don’t have anything to compare this to, but I love it when he kisses me. His kisses have become what I would call a little more urgent lately, and they’ve become open-mouthed. That I like a lot. I can’t go into detail about how I feel, because I am shy—yes, me, I am shy, and yes, with you—but I am sure you will find out very soon what I am talking about, if you haven’t already. Have you? I can’t believe you didn’t let Bindra kiss you before you left. You don’t know what you’re missing. You are so cold-hearted sometimes. That fellow would give his life for you. But if you’re not interested, then you’re not interested, I suppose. Who are you waiting for, anyway? Don’t go and fall in love with some crazy white Canadian, just because you might be lonely. You have to come back here and marry someone from here. I wonder if Bindra will wait for you. Perhaps distance will make your heart grow fonder. A lot of people would want their son to marry into your family. You’re lucky. But Angus is the one for me. It is only a matter of time before Angus and I get on with it, I imagine. If we get married, you will have to come back for the wedding, OK? I can’t believe the things I tell you. I hope you don’t show my letters to anyone.

  OK, write me as soon as you can. I hope you have already, and that this letter and yours to me are crossing paths.

  Your best friend ever, and forever,

  Zain

  My heart quickened. The irony was not lost on me—how could Zain have known when she wrote these notes and letters that they would, long after her passing, mean so much to someone she had never met? I was learning now from her about Sid. It hadn’t occurred to me before that there might have been a time when Zain did not know that kissing this fellow, Bindra, would not have brought Sid any pleasure. It could only have been painful for Sid, traumatic, to have to hide, especially from her closest friend, the fact that she was aware even then that she wouldn’t marry or live a traditional life. But I also knew that, in the end, Zain did not abandon Sid.

  I reflected on the words before me and on what Sydney himself had told me of his adventures with Zain, and I felt, for the first time, gratitude and a kinship with her. We were, I saw, the warp and weft of his life, and as incongruous as it might have been, I felt something akin to excitement begin to creep over me.

  I read the letter that followed, hungry for more about both of them.

  Dearest Sid,

  Dad still isn’t talking to us, and that is causing hard times at home. He refuses to accept that I have taken an apartment up here in Curepe, near the University. Angus still lives with his parents and he drives up for his classes. Of course, he stays over often. Mum knows that Angus stays over, but she hasn’t told Dad. She doesn’t have to. He has it in his head that Angus and I are living together and that I am a fallen woman. Ha! I wish! Well, I am, sort of, aren’t I! I am worried about Mum. Poor thing. She and Dad hardly talk to each other, and I am the cause of it. But, thank God for telephone service coming to the cane field; I talk to Mum every day, two and three times some days. She still (“still”? This will never change!) makes all Dad’s meals and sits at the table with him while he eats, even if they don’t speak a word to each other. I can’t imagine being with anyone like that for an entire lifetime.

  Anyway, enough crying. I am sad you didn’t come for the wedding, which just shows that you are strange, and will probably never change, and I guess I have no choice but to accept you as you are. And if you’re trying to get rid of me, I won’t give you the satisfaction. That is just the kind of person I am. Anyway, we love the bedspread you so kindly sent. It is on the bed right now, and already all kinds of wonderful things have happened beneath it and on top of it! Use your imagination. Angus wants to be a different kind of man, he says, so he makes breakfast on Sunday mornings. Eggs. He can’t cook roti, or choka or anything like that, but he can boil an egg, and do toast. And he actually ties up the garbage and takes it downstairs every night. I can’t believe how lucky I am. (I am half joking, of course.) (But half serious too.) (Men really are a different species. I think they need us more than we need them, which is to acknowledge that we do need them, or at least their bodies! Yes, I am enjoying that part a lot. An awful lot!)

  School is going well. I am still planning to do medicine, but that is one area where Angus and I have disagreements. It’s really the only thing we ever have disagreements about. I don’t think it’s such a big deal, but it’s the only thing we fight about. I really don’t understand. His father talked him into taking over the business, and he talks about me working in the business, regardless of what degree I get or what I say. I will have to show him who is the boss, but there is time for that. I am enjoying being bossed (just a little bit bossed) at the moment.

  So, I hope one day you will tell me what you are learning about yourself. It isn’t very fair to just say, “I am finding out so many things about myself, and my ways in the world are beginning to make sense to me, where they haven’t, either to myself or to others, before.” Just what the heck are you talking about? I am interested—I know sometimes I give—or rather gave—the impression that I wasn’t really interested in what you had to say, only in telling you about myself, but I have to admit I wonder all the time what you’re doing, what you’re seeing, what you’re feeling and thinking, who you’re becoming, and if we’ll always be friends when you come back here, after being in such a big strange place. Just don’t get strange (or should I say strangER?), OK?

  I have to go study now, and then get dinner, but please write me back and tell me something very specific and detailed.

  I love Angus, of course, and deeply too. So, now that that is out of the way, I can tell you I love you, and you won’t think I am strange (I think there are some people like that at the University, but each to his own, her own, whatever!). So:

  I love you,

  Zain

  P.S. Angus sends his love too. He is so sweet.

  ———

  At the bank that day, Mrs. Morgan expressed her sympathy, as if I were Sydney’s closest relative. How much did she know about Sydney? I wondered.

  In the safety deposit box I found another copy of Sydney’s will, the deed to the house, bank share certificates, and share certificates for National Golden Flour Mill and for Tabor Cacao Industry. In a small cream-coloured envelope pocked with what looked like age spots was a tiny yellowed black-and-white photograph with scalloped edges. It showed a little girl in a short frilly dress, a tall, young and rather dashing man and a plump, very well-dressed and good-looking woman. The man, suited, stood on a step holding the child, who sat atop the broad platform of the staircase pillar,
while the woman stood at ground level, one hand on one of the child’s plump legs. The child, who could not have been more than two years of age, had long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and bangs. Her hands were clasped and she grinned as if she were the happiest person on earth. On the back, written in a faded turquoise ink and a hand that took pride in penmanship, were the words Siddhani with Dad and Mum. Mum is pregnant here with Gita. Looking closer I could see that Mrs. Mahale was more than simply plump. I couldn’t for the longest while take my eyes off Sid. I could see nothing in the face of the child in that photo that might have suggested she would one day want to change her gender. Beside the photo in the deposit box was a royal-blue velvet pouch held closed by a gold cord. Inside were delicate pieces of gold jewellery—part, I thought, of Sid’s inheritance from her mother, but nothing I could imagine Sydney ever to have worn, save perhaps for when he was that rather pretty little girl.

  And there were a few newspaper clippings. Quickly scanning them, I recognized the story. How could I not? Ninety-six hours before, Sydney had laid bare what had weighed so heavily on his mind for twenty-five years, and here was the story in my hand, as it had appeared in the news: “Spice Baron’s Wife Murdered in Home Invasion.” I confess I had often thought—without malice, I must add in my defence—that Sydney was an old person doing what old people did: he was reminiscing, stuck on a single story, perhaps even a single point of view, and I was his trapped audience. But as he finally laid out the full story for me in the hours before we took him to the hospital, I had seen why he’d insisted on telling it to me, and why he hadn’t brought it to a close earlier. Now, in my hands, were the news reports of Zain’s murder.

  And last, there were the three notebooks. They were all of the same size, held together with a thin leather cord. I undid the cord and opened one of the books. I knew the handwriting well. I read the first sentence, savouring the familiar neat calligraphy that slanted backwards like men straining on the rope in a game of tug-of-war. But a little farther on I tumbled in a riptide of emotion, surfing one moment with elation that in my hand were words Sydney had written himself, and in the next dragged under that I could not ask him what he had meant by this or by that. In a sense, these, and not the ones he spoke during those last days, were now his final words. I braced myself and read:

  When we were in high school, Zain was so much brighter than us all. I could never understand why she didn’t use her scholarship and study medicine as she had always wanted to do. And I have never been able to understand her father not wanting his daughter “doing that kind of work, man’s work, showing off with her brains.” I couldn’t understand at the time how she let him dictate what she should do. It is only now, after experiencing what it is like to live in a foreign country on one’s own, without family, that I understand. God, Zain, the choices we made. Both of us. Would we have been happier with other choices? Or are hardships just part of any choice? Are hardships simply more difficult to accommodate while advantages are more difficult to see?

  And then, how to explain Zain becoming a Catholic, getting married? Did you really go to church, Zain? I can’t imagine Zain, of all people, genuflecting, crossing herself, taking communion with her hands pressed in prayer. Zain, I bet, was more like a Muslim forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition: Catholic in public, but Muslim at home and in her heart.

  I was thrilled she invited me to the wedding. But I hadn’t told her about myself, and in Canada I had become used to dressing as I pleased, used to wearing slacks and jackets and flat shoes with socks. Can you imagine a woman in Trinidad going to a wedding dressed like that? I was so much more at ease not having to cater my looks and voice and mannerisms to back-home expectations of how women “ought” to be. I no longer knew how to flatter men. No, I would have been out of my depth, out of place at Zain’s wedding.

  Whenever I returned to Trinidad to visit Mum and Dad and Gita, Zain would invite me to her house, and I would be the centre of attention with her two children. They were intrigued that I, who had no husband or children of my own, who lived in another country while my own parents and sister lived in Trinidad, was their mother’s close friend.

  I put that notebook down—exhaustion kept at bay by a faint breathlessness more often associated with elation—and I opened another. Considerations of privacy, and the invasion of such, might have given someone else pause. But he had willed the notebooks to me, and explicitly given me permission to read them.

  Some sections of sidewalk along the mostly residential blocks on Eldon Street had been taken care of with diligence—cleared and salted, salted and cleared, twice a day when the accumulation came down like this. But for the most part I had to take short footsteps, bracing myself on one leg before planting the other, along a packed, uneven path narrowed by the snow shovelled from residents’ driveways and walkways, snow that in turn had been piled up along the sides from the clearing of the main roadway. This is the kind of winter people will say is the worst they’ve seen in their five, or ten or thirty, years of living in the city. The worst in their entire lives. The most snow. The coldest temperatures. The fiercest storms. The longest winter. They say this year after year. The treachery. I was terrified of slipping and losing my grip on the knapsack. As I write this I am suddenly reminded of the men with the snakes around their necks. Do you remember, Zain, how they appeared as we were walking back up the steps from the beach just after the sun had set that evening at Macqueripe?

  How I wish you were with me these days, Zain. How I wish you could accompany me on my trips to the clinic to change the bandages. How I wish you could see what I look like now.

  At just this juncture, Mrs. Morgan knocked on the door to the room to see if I was all right. I closed the book reluctantly. I had come unprepared, so Mrs. Morgan gave me a promotional cloth-bag with the name of the bank printed on it into which I emptied the contents of the deposit box.

  Back home, I shut myself in my room and pulled out the books again.

  You begged me to come down. Come for a month and stay with Angus and me, you said. You told me you felt like a large bear in a small cage. I’d cheer you up, you said. Neither of the children were at home anymore. In any case, they had their own lives now, and it wasn’t right to burden your children. It was just this thing happening inside. Inside of your body and your brain, and you felt like you were going crazy. Trinidad was a small place. Everyone knew everyone. Your friends were Angus’s friends. You felt there was no one you could talk to. But you could talk to me, you said. I’d cheer you up. Speaking on the telephone wasn’t enough. If only we lived in the same country, you said.

  You knew that I did not have a dime. I could not afford spontaneity. I could not contemplate a trip. But without telling me, you organized the return ticket and sent it to me. How the tables had turned in our lives. An open ticket, Toronto to Port of Spain, Port of Spain to Toronto. I only had to fill in the dates.

  You were such a different person on the telephone from the one you were in the flesh. It was as if, on the telephone, all my senses concentrated in my ear and I could hear your voice in a way that I couldn’t when we were in each other’s presence. On the telephone I heard in your voice how unhappy you were. In one of your letters you shared with me your plans—too many for a single person to carry out in a lifetime. You had met a German woman who had been a famous swimming instructor and choreographer. She was in Trinidad with her husband, who was teaching at the University. You asked the woman to give you synchronized swimming lessons. She knew several women who were also interested in synchronized swimming lessons, and the two of you were planning a show in one of the coves in Chaguaramas. Then, in a phone call just a few days later, you informed me that you were thinking of taking piano lessons. You knew of someone who was selling a piano. In that same call you said you wanted to start up an organization to put musical instruments in the hands of underprivileged children, and you might even start a school of music for them. A children’s symphony. Symphony camp. Su
nday concerts in the Botanical Gardens. A gemology course for yourself. Jewellery making. Artisanal bread making. A chauffeuring business with all-women drivers. You wouldn’t drive yourself, of course, but you would own the business and run it. You told me all of this, but you didn’t tell me that you were seeing a man named Eric.

  And now I was engulfed in a confusion of emotion again. I could no longer deny it: I recognized it to be the longing, the readiness, the need—the insistent need—to begin to write again.

  I put the journal down. I was increasingly anxious, aware there were a million and one things to be done, and I was the one expected to take charge. But I felt myself overcome by anticipation—not anticipation of all that was to come in the next few hours, but a sense, an eagerness, that I was about to begin my life anew.

  I thought about the earlier times when Sydney would relate stories about himself or about Zain. I used to become quickly impatient, wanting ones, instead, that showed our connection. Did it take Sydney’s death for me to become more mature? I opened the envelope and removed the will and the newspaper clippings. I flipped through the clippings again, as if doing this were the most urgent task at hand. Sydney had once shown me photographs of Zain. As far as I remembered, those photos showed a simple-looking—neither attractive nor unattractive—young woman. From her eyes one might imagine, especially after reading her girlish letters, that she possessed an acerbic humour. In the newspaper photos she appears to be plump and well-groomed in the manner of the women of the Indo-Trinidadian elite. Her hair, parted on one side, has some lift to it as it falls in great neat waves to her shoulders and frames her well made-up face. The rise in social circumstances that accompanied her marriage and prevailed throughout her adulthood had, I imagined now, given definition to the features that seemed in the earlier photos nebulous. Sydney had told me that there had been no romance between Sid and Zain. I believe this to be true, but I believe, too, that Sid had loved her, and so had Sydney, long after Zain was gone. I pulled the clippings together neatly and replaced them. In his storytelling, during the days when he and I were together, and, now, via the bequeathing of his and Zain’s writings and these newspapers articles, Sydney had afforded me a consideration I had not predicted. Such foresight, openness and generosity overwhelmed me. If there was anything worth inheriting, I thought, it was these qualities. This revelation had the effect of making me want to sequester myself and begin to think and to write.