Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  I returned to the house and in a softer manner asked her if she had everything she needed for the day. Her manner was gentler too, when she replied that she had everything, and added that Carmen’s daughter would be joining to help with the cooking and cleaning. I saw no reason for this, save for the delight of fuss and chaos the occasion of a death here offered, but of course, I made no objection.

  The shirt and the pants were of a startling white colour, their fabric as light and soft as that used to swaddle a newborn baby. I tried them on—the first time I had ever worn anything Indian, even though kurtas were not unfamiliar to me. I thought of Sydney. Of Sid. I heard Rosita’s words, spoken numerous times since his death, that he was right here, watching over and seeing everything. I had dismissed these words as merely typical of Rosita’s ways of thinking, but here I was, imagining that he was indeed watching, that he saw I was preparing to carry out my duties at his funeral.

  When I telephoned Anta to report that the kurta fitted me, she asked what the day had in store for me. I told her that I had to return to the funeral home to approve of Sydney’s appearance. It would be a stressful morning, she commiserated; would I be interested in doing something that offered a respite, if only briefly, from all that was going on? I accepted her offer to meet at a café in Port of Spain. She would take me from there on a short relaxing hike up to a nearby waterfall. As I put down the phone I could not tell which was greater: my desire to see her, or my nervousness over returning to the funeral home and the prospect of seeing Sydney again.

  Just before entering the cold room where Sydney lay, I mused how, in Canada, I had never heard of anyone doing this kind of thing. I wondered if seeing the body of the deceased was a more natural way of being, a healthier attitude towards the dead and death, or part of a backward way of life.

  As it turned out, Sydney in death looked remarkably as he had in life. If it were not for the frills in the interior of the coffin, how its cushioned walls hugged his body tightly, and how straight he was arranged, I would have thought he was lying in a strange bed, merely asleep.

  The mortician allowed me some minutes with Sydney, and the question I had arrived with was answered in part when I gave in to a surprising and urgent desire to touch Sydney’s face. Although I had expected it to be cold, I was startled. The surface of the skin seemed soft until I let my hand rest too heavily, and I felt beneath it a sobering hardness. He looked so much like himself, but the one expression on his face, while certainly his, was all that there was. I was in the room alone with him for no more than three minutes, but it was long enough for me to believe that his soul had, as Pundit had told me, flown away and this was what had been left behind. Still, I rested my hand lightly on the cheek of the face of that body, and felt regret that I had not been physically closer to Sydney in the last years of his life. I felt, too, humbled by this opportunity here in Trinidad to take care of him one last time.

  Back at the house, as I packed a bag with my swimming trunks and a towel, I naturally thought of Catherine. I felt some guilt—not because I was about to head off to meet Anta, but for having held on to Catherine. I knew in my bones that our relationship had, for both of us, ended. The guilt was so strong that I gave in and phoned her. Thankfully, she did not answer her land line or her cellphone. I did not leave messages on either.

  Anta was an only child, she told me as we went around the Queen’s Park Savannah. She was the daughter and the son her mother had wanted, and she was the daughter and the son her father had wanted too. This wasn’t my first time around the Savannah, but Anta drove slowly and pointed out the colonial buildings that were now used as government offices, and the island’s two most prestigious boys’ secondary schools, Saint Mary’s College and Queen’s Royal College, the former looking like a monastery, the latter like a grandiose German Renaissance facsimile. In some ways, it was the first time I was seeing them.

  Her time was clearly her own and I wondered aloud if she had a job or profession. She explained that she had an undergraduate degree in music, and on afternoons she gave private lessons on the harmonium and the sitar. She sang, too, and played these instruments at her father’s temple.

  Her family, I learned, was an odd mix of Indian and Hindu tradition and modernism. Her father, she told me, used to provoke discussion with her and goad her on to disagree with him, taking one side of an argument one day and quite the opposite the next. He no longer did this, for now they knew each other so well that they anticipated too quickly what argument each had waiting. When she did something that displeased him and her mother, she was made to choose her own punishment, one that was appropriate, neither lenient nor exaggerated, and she was made to defend the choice of punishment rather than to dwell directly on her infractions.

  Pundit used the excuse nowadays of his cataracts for asking her to drive him about, but he had begun to teach her to drive when she was ten years old and had to sit on cushions so that she could see above the steering wheel. She remembered, she told me, at age fourteen driving him one night to a neighbour’s house. The place was not too far away, but it was illegal and dangerous for her to drive all the same. Her father had taken her with him everywhere he went when she was a child, much to many people’s dismay, but those people came, in time, to regard her with the respect they would have given her brother, had she one. If those people had daughters he would preach directly to the daughters, sometimes to the amusement, but more regularly to the chagrin, of the girls’ relatives, pointing out his own Anta, saying that if she could do all of these things herself—if she could study and come in the first three in her class, if she could build and decorate a bedi, if she could rub her father’s and mother’s legs with sesame oil, if she could go to the shop for her mother and tell any wayward young men who had words for her along the way what was good for them without swearing or disrespecting herself, if she could climb a mango tree and bring down the chicken from it—if she could do all of this and still be the daughter any parent could want, including a pundit, then they, too, should be able to do these things. Nowadays, she gave her mother a rest by doing the driving that, on account of the cataracts, her father could no longer do, and she read the newspapers and magazines to him. There was little time for a social life, she told me, but she liked it that way.

  And boyfriends? I asked.

  There is no one special, she said. There were always, of course, inquiries from families who were interested in her as a wife for their son. She could have been born with leopard spots on her face, she said, and there would be interest in her, because she was the daughter of a pundit.

  And you haven’t accepted anyone? I persisted. We were both grinning like teenagers now.

  “My heart had not been moved yet,” she said, more seriously, and it was as if her breath had suddenly been caught.

  “Your heart?” I asked, adding, What does the heart have to do with a pundit’s daughter?

  My parents, she answered, believe in love.

  Later that afternoon, blissfully tired from swimming, I did not want to write. This time, I went to Sydney’s room and got the knapsack out of his cupboard. And once more, for a last time, wanting to confirm Zain’s voice in my mind, I read a handful of her letters.

  Dear Sid,

  I was very surprised to get a response from you at all, and so quickly. Everyone is well, thanks. I can’t imagine leaving Aliya for another year or so, and even then it would be difficult, except that sometimes I think she thinks my mother is actually her mother, which I don’t really mind. I love how close she and Mum are with each other. Anyway, I will one of these days surely visit you.

  Congratulations on the exhibition. Can you send photos of your paintings? I’ll have to buy one of them before you get so famous that they’d be out of my reach. We are building a new factory on the land in Central. We’re also acquiring a lot of new machinery. So it’s really busy here.

  I see you took offence to me saying that it was natural to be a mother and a wife. Can I say that
it is natural for me? And that I am totally fine—I make no judgement—if it isn’t something you want to do? I am a little surprised at how verbose you were about it. From this I realize that the subject means a great deal to you. So you got me thinking, in truth, about the idea of what is natural and normal. I can think about it with a touch more clarity than I can write about it, but what I want to say is that I can see how these things—the value given to being a mother and a wife—might be cultural. (And it sure is a value in a lot of cultures. But maybe cultures change with time. And with the times.) But you and I are from the same culture, and since I trust your judgements about what you need for your own happiness, all I can come up with is that somehow our cultures might be a little different. We’re from the same country and same race—so maybe you being Hindu and me Muslim has something to do with it? But every Hindu girl/woman I know shares the same idea as mine about being a wife and a mother, so either I know only the ones who think like me, and not the ones—besides you—who don’t, or this difference might have something to do with how liberal your family is compared to mine. Or maybe it is just that you are different. You are unique, and there is nothing unnatural about your idea—it is just different, and you are just different. In any case, it was always your differences that made you so interesting. And I wouldn’t want you to be anything else, or anything you didn’t want to be, or are not. I don’t need to understand you, I realize; but come to think of it, I want to understand you. I just need you to be more like me so I can do that.

  I hope you’re following me, as this is all very important to me. The one thing I don’t need to understand is my connection to/love for you. It’s just a fact.

  Love always, and all ways,

  Z

  Sid, I’m sending this to you with much love. Aliya is six months old in this picture. She has Angus’s chin and my eyes. Mum spends a lot of time over here these days so that I can study (one more course to go and I am finished). It’s good to have Mum here with us—we’re eating well, for a change. You know I can’t cook roti to save my life. We usually buy it from Ali’s but Mum’s is so much better. And cheaper! I can’t believe I just wrote that. It’s not like we have worries about money at all. I’m not boasting, you understand; I just want to tell you all that is happening to me. Anyway, the other side of Mum’s presence here is that we’re all putting on a lot of weight. Aliya is such a good baby. She doesn’t cry—except when she is hungry or wet. Otherwise she smiles a lot, and makes the sweetest attempts to have conversation with us—and I find myself talking back in imitation, in baby talk. I never thought I’d do that, but she gets so excited, and looks really satisfied when I speak back to her like that. I wish you could see her before she grows up.

  Z

  Dear Sid,

  I have been writing you in my head all day, and I still can’t find the right words. I don’t know if I ever will. I only know that the words I have are the wrong ones. I know this instinctively, but I don’t have others, no matter how hard I try, to talk with you about what you told me in your last letter.

  First of all, I want you to know that ours is a ’til-death-do-us-part connection, just as I always knew it would be, even if you didn’t. So I think we just have to try to figure out how to talk to each other about this. I have to tell you that I am very very happy that you told me. It explains so much to me. I never understood why you didn’t have a boyfriend. And I always knew you were—I want to say strange, but I don’t mean it in a negative way. I suppose I could say different. It can’t be easy for you. This makes me wish I were close by, so that I could be there for you, and so that you could know how much you mean to me.

  It is hard, if not sad, to think I have known you all these years, and thought of you as my best friend, only to realize that I didn’t really know who you were. On the one hand I wasn’t really surprised when I read your letter, but on the other hand I was very surprised. Both at the same time. I guess my surprise was more that you had been this way while I knew you, and I was oblivious to it. You must have been going through agony and I didn’t know about it. I can understand that this was not an easy thing to tell me, but still, I am your best friend, and I can’t help but feel as if you weren’t truthful to me. Can I assume that I meant so much to you, that you didn’t want to lose me? I’ll accept that! But did you also think so little of me? That I am so small-minded? I don’t understand what it all means, and I want you to tell me. You’ll have to have patience with me. But I think this is only fair—payback for all the patience I have had with you.

  I have questions to ask you. How long have you known this about yourself, and how did you know? And do you mind if I tell Angus? I talk to him about everything—but I don’t have to tell him this if you’d rather I didn’t.

  One thing I wonder is if you knew about yourself since we were in high school—and if you did, how hard it must have been for you, having to make sure no one found out. I can’t help but think of Jenny Ginsun. Do you remember her? We used to say that she was—well, I don’t want to repeat those things. I feel so badly about how everyone used to bad talk Jenny, and I also remember you saying to me that people should just be allowed to be the way they are, and that we shouldn’t harass her so much because we don’t know anything about her life at home, or how our lives would turn out. Do you remember saying these things? Did you actually know about her then, and did you know about yourself too? How you must have felt. I do know that she never really bothered me or, rather, I couldn’t really be bothered with her—because she never actually bothered anyone, did she. But I never tried to stop others from bad talking her, even if I myself didn’t. I feel so terrible about so many things right now, and wish you were here so that we could talk. It’s difficult to say everything in a letter, especially when you have to wait for a reply—and may never get one! I love you, Sid.

  Take care of yourself, and be happy. You deserve to be. There is so much I admire about you. Your best friend forever,

  Z

  Before putting Sydney’s notebooks aside, too, I succumbed to the hunger for one last morsel of knowledge about this man who meant so much to me. I cupped one of the dairies in one hand by its spine, allowing the little book to fall open where it would, knowing that the act was like that of a believer who turns at random to a spiritual text in the confidence that the chance reading will speak directly to his need.

  Zain, if you can hear me now, you will realize I am still waiting to hear how you could have gone first. Your death is not something I had ever imagined, and so many years later it is still unimaginable. Do you know what I did before returning to Trinidad for your funeral? I went down to my storage locker to look for the two photographs, the only ones I have, of you. My locker was so crammed with stuff, Zain, I could hardly move through it. But that was good because, as it turned out, it was useful to see this snapshot of my life, starting with the wall of boxes and piled up furniture that greeted me. I had stored away everything I didn’t use on a daily basis to make room in my little apartment for my canvases, which I would spread out and paint on, on the floor. But now it was oddly calming, reassuring, to see this collection of clothes, kitchenware, tools and books.

  I pulled out one of the boxes of books and opened it. On top was a manual on how to care for antiques. I was struck by the realization that I had bought this book imagining that in Canada I would live in a home full of priceless antiques and, like my mother, have to care for them. I pulled out a blond maple-wood coffee table, the surface of which, with a wood-burning pen in my first year at art school, I had etched with a mass of banana leaves and anthurium lilies. It had moved from India’s basement to this locker. On a shelf in the locker were sculptures in clay, wood, and metal. There were, naturally, the rolls of canvases, work I’d done during the years I lived with India and Jonathan. There was camping gear I’d bought and used once, a fishing rod and vest that still had the sale tag hanging from it, a rack of dumbbells for weight training. You’d think I was a real jock. There was a
filing cabinet crammed with papers—I couldn’t remember now why I’d kept them. I surveyed the collection, feeling that I didn’t know the person to whom these things belonged.

  I thought of all that money you, Zain, had given me one week before. You, the only person who had ever accepted me as I was, were gone now, and very possibly because I could not stand up for myself, and could not protect you. There in my locker, your death gave me sudden clarity. I had intended to deposit the money, but the envelope was still on my dresser. I knew that with it you’d given me the means to rectify what had put you in jeopardy, even if it was too late. I knew, unequivocally, what I would do with the money. I would go to your funeral, and on my return I would begin to think about the lengthy process—which you in so many ways had set in motion—of altering my body.

  I opened box after box until I came across the bundle of letters and notes that you wrote me when we were in high school. I have read them so many times since then that I know them by heart.

  Sid,

  Don’t pass any more notes through Singh-Johnstone. I don’t know what’s wrong with her today. She might tell on us. We didn’t get our marks back in Chemistry yet. I can’t wait. I bet I beat her ass again. She has brains but no sense of humour and no community spirit. Did you get any of your mid-term marks yet? What am I supposed to do for Assembly? I don’t want to talk about being a Muslim, don’t want to talk about God. I could hand out the recipe for seiwine, have everyone recite it along with me. Sid, Look at Augusta’s shoes. What do you think of them? Where on earth does she shop? She can’t dress to save her life. I hope she doesn’t keep us in late today. Dear Sid, Just close your eyes for one minute and think of the countless number of people besides you in this world. It’s frightening—you in the midst of them all, a non-entity. And then it’s warm, hot actually, as a blanketing cloud of brotherhood creeps over us.