Bridget’s father looked at Albert for a little while to make sure he was finished speaking. “That isn’t really what we were talking about, now, is it?” he said, at length. “That’s not what I would call the issue at hand. I believe what we were talking about was a lot of jeezless punks who should all be sent to military school. That’ d straighten them all out pretty damn quick. They’ d take that heavy-metal horseshit, the army would, and all those big ideas about the world and how they should all kill the parents who feed them and grow their hair to their arseholes and be a bunch of faggots who don’t have children but want to adopt normal people ’s and eventually kill off the whole goddamn human race, the army would sew all that horseshit up into a tight little ball, stick it in a rifle and fire it straight up their arse, that’s what a little discipline would do for those sons of whores. ”
“Oh, now, ” said Father Stewart, rousing himself a little. “My. ”
Between four and six in the morning, Bridget would dream she was still on the ward, packing to go home. She was feeling around in the ceiling tiles, where she used to hide money and Mars bars and the like from the staff, looking for her stuff, but none of it was there. Instead she kept pulling out handfuls of all these nonsensical items, all this crap. Car alarms, even though she wasn’t really sure what a car alarm would look like. Plain doughnuts. The filter out of her mother’s clothes dryer. The head off a Barbie. And one morning at about eleven o’ clock Bridget came downstairs to pour herself a cup of tea, and her mother told her she had already come down four hours earlier. Bridget didn’t believe her. Joan had said that Bridget had looked her straight in the eye and demanded: “Where the hell is it?”
“It’s up in bed, dear,” Joan had supplied without batting an eye. Maternal telepathy.
“Up in bed? Are you sure?”
“Yes, it’s up in bed, dear, go on up. ”
“All right then!” Bridget supposedly had said, stomping back up the stairs.
Bridget’s father had given her a couple of Rollie ’s statues. One blob was supposed to represent the Virgin and another was the Virgin and Child. It was ironic, but she knew he didn’t mean it to be. When she and Gerard were children, her father always made sure that there were one or two religious pictures hanging on both their walls. Bridget always got the Virgin, the Baby, or the Virgin with the Baby, whereas Gerard always got a grown-up Jesus doing stuff — cleansing the temple, showing Thomas the holes in his hands and whatnot. Her father had this idea that girls liked Mary and boys liked Jesus, just as girls liked Barbies and boys liked GI Joes. So he had picked out the Madonna blobs for Bridget merely on the assumption that they were the most appropriate choices. Gerard got “Jesus Heals the Sick. ”
“There,” he said. “You two go upstairs and pray to those for a little while, see if that doesn’t do ya any good.”
Bridget put them on her nightstand, which was where he would be looking for them, and prayed vaguely for no dreams. Then she had a nightmare about the Christmas turkey, the first frightening dream she’ d had since, probably, the first trimester, when she went around punching herself in the gut and doing sit-up after sit-up after sit-up. Her father had just cut into the bird when it leaped off the table, still hot and crackling from the oven, screaming, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!” Trailing stuffing across the kitchen floor.
photo: Rob Appleford
LYNN COADY’s Strange Heaven was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and won the Dartmouth Book Award and the Atlantic Booksellers’ Choice Award. She has since written three novels, Saints of Big Harbour, Mean Boy (which won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction), and the Giller-nominated The Antagonist, all national bestsellers. She has also written two books of short stories, Play the Monster Blind and Hellgoing, which won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her non-fiction has appeared in Canadian Geographic Traveller, Hazlitt, and Chatelaine. She is co-founder and editor-at-large of the award-winning magazine Eighteen Bridges and divides her time between Edmonton and Toronto.
Fiction by Shauna Singh Baldwin
The Selector of Souls (2012)
We Are Not in Pakistan (2007)
The Tiger Claw (2004)
What the Body Remembers (1999)
English Lessons and Other Stories (1996)
“Simran” previously appeared in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s 1996 story collection, English Lessons and Other Stories, published by Goose Lane Editions.
AMRIT
Veeru and I had dinner at the Delhi Gymkhana Club around midnight and then drove to greet Simran at Palam airport. I was the first to find her as we peered through the glass wall smeared by the breath of waiting friends and relatives. She looked bright and alive despite a twenty-six-hour plane ride, and she’ d put on a little weight in just four months in America. I was glad to see she was excited to see us. In America, children learn that they can blame their parents for everything and then they all, parents and children, spend years in psychotherapy. I felt so relieved to see her I was almost in tears. Which mother wouldn’t worry about a nineteen-year-old unmarried daughter so far away?
She asked questions about everyone as if she had been away a year and I was glad to notice she had not caught an American accent. (I have always tried to teach my pupils to speak the Queen’s English.) When we got home, she went around the house touching everything familiar as if to reassure herself that it was all just as she left it. Although it was four in the morning by then, she wanted Veeru to put some brandy in her hot milk and Ovaltine just as he did when she was a child.
I listened with every nerve to her excited, animated chatter. I was determined to notice any signs of change in her. I had good reason. Every time we called (person to person calls, three minutes, cost a hundred rupees) she was “out.” Yet in every letter she said she was studying hard and taking our advice to stay clear of Americans and make friends with other foreign students. She’d always been addicted to books, but we were troubled by the constant excuse, “I was at the library. ” I’ve never known a library that stayed open till midnight, and we go to some of the best libraries in Delhi.
It was Kanti, who’s been with our family now for almost fourteen years, who found the first thing that made me worry. She was unpacking Simran’s suitcases, and she held up a clothbound volume, asking where Simran wanted her to place it. I said, “Let me see that.”
When I realized that it was a copy of the Koran that lay cradled in my only daughter’s baggage, I was horrified. What had my daughter exposed herself to in America? We are a proud Sikh family and we have long memories. Our Gurus were tortured to death by Moghul rulers only three hundred years ago, and both Veeru’s father and mine still get tears in their eyes talking about the fate of old Sikh friends and neighbours at the hands of Muslim marauders during the 1947 partition. Veeru is even old enough to remember the sight of Sikh women, raped and disgraced by Muslims, walking home to Amritsar. And my daughter comes back from America with a copy of the Koran? I don’t know what is in it — I only know it is the book that gave its believers permission to kill us. Out loud, I said sternly, “I do not want this book in my house.”
“Oh, Mummy, how silly. It’s just a present I got from a friend when I was leaving for the winter break. What’s so terrible about it?”
“What’s so terrible? Ask your father. See if he’ll allow this in our house.”
“C’mon, Mumji. I’ve read the Bible and the Gita, too. Just because you read something doesn’t mean you have to believe it; just because you read something doesn’t mean it’s true. You really should be more tolerant. Have you read it?”
“Don’t say ‘come on’ to me. Of course I haven’t read it. All I can say is, you better not let your father see it.”
She was about to argue but thought better of it. It was her first night home, after all. She nudged Kanti aside and began unpacking herself, as if she were Kanti’s servant and not the other way around. I said, “You’r
e not in America anymore, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Let Kanti do it or you will make her upset.”
She said, “I’m looking for the presents I brought back. ” And soon, forgetting our little tussles, she had them spread on the bed. A length of cloth for a salwar kameez for me, polyester with a self-design (I think about eight dollars per yard), a tie for Veeru (about twenty dollars, not a brand name I recognized, but he thought it was an excellent choice), a box of chocolates for her brother away at boarding school in Dehradun (maybe ten dollars), and — she’s picked up the American habit of spoiling the servants — a sari length for Kanti that must have cost at least fifty dollars.
I said, “Don’t be so generous — give her the box of chocolates. ”
She grinned mischievously, “And give the sari to Raju?”
“No — we’ll find him something else.”
“I’m only joking.”
“I know your kind of joking.”
We settled on a bottle of hand lotion for Kanti instead, but I lay next to Veeru with a sense of apprehension afterwards, watching the winter sun rise over my roses and chrysanthemums as the mali tended them outside our window. Finally, I told him what I found in her luggage. He was appalled, as I knew he would be — all he kept saying was, “My daughter? My daughter reading the Koran?” He would not sleep till I promised to watch Simran carefully for signs that she might be in danger of becoming a Muslim.
MIRZA
You couldn’t miss Simran sitting on that bar stool in the residence hall lounge, because she was a splash of red, gold, and orange in a room full of faded jeans, sweatshirts, and denim jackets. She had the panicked look of a recently arrived foreign student, and I knew she came from some convent girls’ school in Pakistan or India from the way she shrank backwards every time a man walked too close. She sipped her drink looking over the top of the glass, huge fish-shaped eyes darting from one speaker to another.
I was in love before I crossed the room to ask her name, introduce myself as Mirza, the head of the Pakistani Cultural Society, and ask her which part of the subcontinent she was from. When she said Delhi, India, I hesitated a bit. Then I asked, “Did your family originally come from Pakistan before 1947?”
“Yes,” she said. “Lahore.”
“Lahore! My family is from Lahore, too.”
They weren’t, but I was in love, so they had to be.
She looked relieved, moving a little on the bar stool, just enough so that I heard the chink of glass bangles and noticed she had painted toenails. I hadn’t seen a woman with bangles or painted toenails in North Carolina in two years — all the time I’d been there. I praised Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful, for rewarding me by sending her.
I have to say she made no attempt to be artful. She simply managed to fill my entire mind within ten minutes. I listened to her demure talk about coming to America to learn computer science and thought, “You don’t know ishk yet, meri jaan. When you learn ishk you will forget computer science, and nothing but love will enter your mind. ”
Aloud, I said, “It is very refreshing to find a woman from our part of the world who is interested in such important topics as computer science. Progress depends on women’ s education, I have always said. ” Of course, I had said nothing of the kind, ever, but that was what she wanted to hear, so I said it. And I added casually, “You know, I am a computer science major too — just a few years ahead of you, that’s all.”
She was impressed. I could see it from the way she looked at my glasses with a new respect. I am not as tall as most men from Pakistan, and my hair is already thinning slightly though I’m only twenty-one, but I straightened up to my full height and said, “Just call me if you have any trouble with your classes at all.”
And I took the opportunity to give her my phone number and get hers. Then as I advised her about the different Indian and Pakistani cultural groups and expounded on how Indians and Pakistanis are friends in America, the American students left us alone as usual in a little island surrounded by ignorance, and together we watched them become steadily less and less inhibited. She showed a most proper disgust, and if I thought she could have been a little less curious I kept it to myself. A red-haired fellow lurched too close and I said, assuming a slight accent, “You gotta watch out for these guys.”
Over the next few weeks, I made myself indispensable to her. I advised her on everything, whether I knew anything about it or not. My older brother always said, “You have to make them think you know more than they do, or you don’t get their respect.” I also know the promise of protection is the easiest way to seduce a woman — at least, any woman from my part of the world. So I offered her mine.
I showed her how to use a cash machine (I was glad she didn’t ask how the damned thing worked, because I couldn’t have told her), explained the phone system so that she could call home, introduced her to the transient world of international students as if she were my personal property . . . and very soon everyone thought she was my property. All but Simran herself.
If only I had known then — she was bent on driving me mad.
AMRIT
She had been home only a few days, when I began to notice she’ d started doing some strange things. Keeping a diary, for instance. I began to watch what I said to her, because I was getting the feeling she was going to write it all down in that diary. It was as if she was studying us, looking at us as if she’ d never seen us before, questioning, questioning everything. I said, “Simran, it’s really not ladylike to ask so many questions.”
“Not ladylike, Mummy!” She let out a peal of laughter. Was it my imagination, or did she laugh a lot more and louder since she came home? Even her limbs imitated American indiscipline; her gestures were wider, and when she wore a sari I was dismayed that she no longer walked with a graceful glide, but strode as firmly as any shameless blonde woman. For this I sent her to America?
I found some comfort in the thought that her behaviour did not seem to be that of a woman who wishes to convert to Islam.
MIRZA
Try as I might, Simran never seemed conscious of the fact that I am a man. The same girl who told a friend she felt uncomfortable talking to a male professor without the door of his office open or another woman present regarded me as if I was an amusing younger brother. She allowed me to bring her laddoos from an Indian store in Raleigh and to buy her chocolates from Woolworth without attaching any significance to my actions. I started buying more expensive gifts, as if my job in the Union cafeteria made me a millionaire. Did she need film to send pictures home to her Mummy and Daddy? I bought her a dozen. Did she not have a poster for her little dorm room? I bought one for her. Did she need a calculator? I held forth for an hour on the relative merits of different brands, and then I ran out and bought her the most expensive one.
I always knew where to find her — wrapped in a shawl in a corner study carrel on the third floor of the library, reading and reading as if her life depended on it. The books she was reading had nothing to do with computer science — I can’t remember what they were, but I’m sure they must have been where she learned the tricks that she used later to drive me to do the things I did.
The semester was coming to an end when she told me her parents had decided they could afford to spend the money for her to fly home for the three-week break. I was distraught. No warning. No discussion of how I might be feeling. No concern for my well-being while she was gone. No “Mirza, how will you survive?” All she said was, “If I wasn’t going back to India, I’d take a train and go all over looking at this country, talking to everyone, everyone along the way. Why don’t you do that, Mirza? It might be fun!”
Sometimes she really made me angry with her suggestions. Why didn’t I do that? Because the only country I would want to explore would be Pakistan — that’s the only country that is beautiful. And besides, having spent all my money on her, I didn’t have much left to go anywhere over the three-week break. Instead, I would stay on the empty c
ampus in my room, as I’ d done many times before — only this time I would have her to wait for.
But would she wait for me? I began to worry. She was nineteen years old. I asked some friends in the Pakistani Cultural Society and they thought Sikh women are usually married by the time they are twenty. Could it be that her parents wanted her to return to India to be engaged or married? It would, after all, be wiser if she were not dangling before every man’s nose in this fashion. I thought I must tell her my feelings and discuss — what? — marriage? I suppose so. But somehow I had a difficult time imagining her, a Sikh, married to me.
A few days before she left, taking the Amtrak train to New York to fly home, I gave her an English translation of the Koran. I don’t know what she thought when I gave it to her — all I know is that she treated it like all my gifts before; she was too kind to refuse them, but she could not imagine the feeling that drove me to give her anything — everything. I walked back to my cell in the dorm and picked up the campus directory. Idly, I looked up her name and noted that her permanent address and phone number in Delhi were listed. I copied them carefully — as though I were in any danger of forgetting them once I had seen them! Then I sat down to write love poetry to my oblivious beloved.
AMRIT
Veeru is not accustomed to being challenged in his own household, and that, too, by his daughter. Almost in the first week she was home they began to argue regularly, and it made me anxious about her future. I told him we should try and introduce her to some nice families, maybe get her engaged before she went back to America. In my way of thinking, he’ d brought it on himself by wanting her to have this American degree. I never studied in America, and I have been content because I have always known instinctively and naturally just how far I can push the men around me, when to be winsome, when to be silent, when to become visibly sick with internal pain rather than unbecomingly obstinate. In four months in “the States,” as she called it, Simran had lost all restraint, all decorum.
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