The Journey Prize Stories 28

by Kate Cayley

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  Roxane inhales deeply. Can she smell something, through the stench—burning hair, a copperish twinge, saline wafting up the escapeway?

  Was Johnny awake when the fire cast shadows on the tarp, a magic lantern for his winding sheet, when the worms cuddled into the treads of his boots? Or had the smoke made it all a bad dream?

  All you have to do is sit still, wait for rescue.

  But in the meantime, the fluorescent eye of the trap door pins Roxane to the ledge. Poised upon the surface of the dark like a shipwrecked traveller clinging to a bit of driftwood that floats atop a quiet sea.

  There’s a rasp of boot tread on metal. A low chuckle ripples up from just beneath the light; the sound resonates in Roxane’s ears. It’s not until she closes her mouth that she realizes she’s been laughing at herself.

  Shut up, she mutters.

  But she knows she’ll hear the sound again before she sees the sun.

  MAHAK JAIN

  THE ORIGIN OF JAANVI

  As I usually do on the weekends, I went shopping at Costco after lunchtime, packing the trolley with diapers for newborns, though I had bought three packs last weekend. I read on a parenting website that newborns need a change twelve times a day, and one pack contains two hundred. So a pack would last us only two weeks, and we might be too busy then to buy more. I also found a yellow pillow for feeding that I thought Sapna might find useful. I grabbed it, then I wheeled back the cart to pick up a pink-coloured spare for when the first became soiled.

  After lunchtime was the most crowded time of day to shop. Every other aisle, there were sampling stations and crowds in semicircles around them. I had a quarter-slice of white bread spread with hazelnut chocolate, some coconut water, and a couple of cheeses.

  Near the checkout, a woman was roasting coffee for sampling, but it wasn’t ready yet. I lingered in the area, but then I saw a sign for pyjamas for women. Sapna had mentioned needing some more for after the baby was born, and I decided to pick two sets up for her.

  By the time I remembered the coffee, a crowd had formed. I tried to reach for a sample, but it was impossible. An Indian woman positioned herself before the sample tray, passing the half-filled Styrofoam cups back to another Indian woman. I knew they were Indian because they were speaking Hindi to each other and when they did speak English I could hear a heavy accent. I started becoming annoyed. The quantity of cups passed back outnumbered the people the two women had with them.

  The second Indian woman was taking the half-filled cups and repouring to fill each cup further. She threw away the empties and returned the full cups to her partner at the station, who then added milk and sugar and passed the cups back again. These were then distributed to the remaining members of their group—a man and three children.

  The assembly line they had created had caused a jam at the station, and the woman serving was bristling—her cheeks red, her lips pressed—though she kept quiet. I was embarrassed and angry and felt the need to apologize. Then I realized that to the server I would appear to be with the Indian woman and her family, so I hurried to the checkout, my face hot.

  On the ride home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the shame of it. The impression it must have left on that woman—greedy Indians, selfish Indians, uncouth Indians. And who was I to argue, to try and defend, with such evidence on display? At a store like Sabzi Mandi, in Brampton—Browntown, it was called—packed with goods imported from India and even more Indians, I could laugh at something like that, but the incident made me want to erase the colour from my skin.

  When I arrived home, the minivan I bought for Sapna was sitting in the garage. She never used it, though I bought it for her to get around while I was at the lab, which I was most days. I brought in the groceries, hoping she would come greet me in the kitchen. She was on the phone, and when I heard what she was saying, I realized she hadn’t heard me arrive.

  I left the grocery bags on the counter. The rummaging would give away my presence, even though the garage door hadn’t. I could have used a bathroom break or even a glass of water, but I resisted both urges. From the security of the kitchen, I listened to the side of the conversation I could make out.

  “Mumma,” Sapna was saying, “I know it is my duty. I am doing my duty. But they have kept this secret from us, it was as good as a lie…

  “I am happy, yes, it is fine being married to him, I don’t have much to complain about…

  “But if something happens to my child, your grandchild…And the doctor says if my test results are not good, it could be so much worse, Mumma…”

  I couldn’t make out the rest because Sapna’s words disappeared behind tears.

  I didn’t think that was true, the accusation that my family kept my disorder a secret. Thalassemia, that was what it was called, from the Greek thalassa for sea, haema for blood—in other words, a sea of blood, or blood infected by the salt of the sea.

  The reality was that until the pregnancy, I had managed to dismiss from my mind that I was a carrier. I knew I was, of course, but the knowledge that had dogged me in Delhi had become dormant in Brampton. It was why I never insisted on prenatal testing; but then, I wasn’t even aware we were trying to get pregnant until I discovered we were.

  If Sapna had asked me, before we married, do you have any defects our children could inherit, I would have answered her honestly. I would have informed her that, due to a history of near-incestuous breeding in India, she, too, could be harbouring defects that would pass on to our children.

  It wasn’t as if I was debilitated. I had Thalassemia minor, which I hadn’t worried about since I moved to Canada, more than ten years ago now, when I was twenty-one. Even the doctor agreed I was only a carrier. The anemia the disease resulted in hadn’t caused me to suffer much. As I get older, my health will probably become worse, but that’s true of everyone. Most of us don’t know what we’ll suffer from as we age.

  I tried to explain this to Sapna, on the way home from the doctor’s, when we had first realized the risk to our baby. “You could say that I am more prepared than most,” I said. “Because I already know the ways I will suffer.”

  “And the ways our child will suffer?” She kept her head leaning against the window. She had not looked at me since the doctor’s. “What about that?” The doctor had said that if Sapna was also a carrier of Thalassemia minor, our baby would have a “twenty-five percent chance of being born with Thalassemia major.” There would have to be tests and waiting, lots of waiting, which was the part Sapna found the most difficult.

  I had thought about telling her what some researchers supposed: that the disorder had stuck around as an evolutionary necessity, to keep malaria at bay. The body has a way of fighting back, I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t think she would understand.

  The phone call ended, and I started pulling out the groceries noisily.

  “I didn’t hear you coming,” she said from behind.

  “I just got here. I bought more diapers and some pyjamas. I can return them if you don’t like them.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Were you on the phone?”

  “Mumma called.”

  “Say hello to her from me next time.” I paused, considering a bag of milk. “Actually, maybe she wants to come visit. With the baby coming so soon.”

  “To visit?”

  “She could come on a visitor’s visa.” The idea had occurred to me just then. It was so obvious: Sapna’s distress must be amplified by her feelings of homesickness. “She could be here before the baby’s even born.”

  “I’ll see if she wants to. My feet are hurting. Do you mind if I go lie down for a bit?”

  “Of course not. You don’t have to ask.” When I turned around, she had already left.

  I prepared a note for Sapna on the kitchen counter: “I need to go to the lab for a few hours,” I wrote. I considered adding, “Call if you need anything,” but that sounded odd. I wasn’t sure what kind of salutation I should end with either.
I scrapped the note and started over. “I am going to the lab and will be back for dinner at 6:30 p.m.” This was better. It was more precise. “You can reach me at the work phone or on my cell.” My hand hovered above the words. I finished off the note with, “Be well. Santosh.”

  The lab was a forty-minute drive from the house, attached to a research centre based out of a university in Hamilton. The first time Sapna had seen it, she described it as a cross between an aquarium and a mental asylum. The shelves and tables were lined with tanks of striped fish, black-and-white like old-fashioned prison uniforms, green-and-yellow like winter squash, and many such combinations that Sapna had, after her initial reluctance, come to see the beauty of. The blue-lit water and the slowly rising bubbles made the lab peaceful and meditative.

  When I arrived, I felt calm and sleepy, and it was difficult, more than usual, to concentrate on the data I still needed to pore through. We were approaching the experimental phase of our research, which was on filial cannibalism. The type of fish we had selected, different varieties of teleost fish, were known to eat some of the eggs they fertilized, a form of population control. The fish whose tanks were provided with more food, however, didn’t eat as many fertilized eggs. After all, there is no cost to reproducing when you are rich.

  We were looking to see how the parent fish would react when we mixed in eggs fertilized by foreign fish. One would expect a poorer parent to cannibalize these before approaching its own offspring, but how would a richer parent behave? My team hypothesized that it would behave the same as an equally rich fish that had no foreign offspring in its brood. To my younger students I explained it as a question of economics versus romantic notions of paternity. Evolution didn’t hinge on or care for romance.

  I had tried explaining the research I was doing to Sapna, but she was bothered that there were creatures in the world who would eat their children. “Even if it makes sense, rationally,” she said. “But at least they are fish. Not like us.”

  “Actually, researchers are investigating similar behaviour in mammals,” I had replied.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she asked what we would do with the fish once the research was completed. “And all those unhatched eggs,” she said. “The ones that…survive.” I shouldn’t have hesitated, but I did, and before I could speak, she had concluded the worst. “That’s horrible. Even worse than what the parents do. At least they don’t know any better.”

  Sapna and I often reached an impasse on such matters. Early in our marriage, I had tried to convince her to watch documentaries with me, mostly stuff on animals and ecology. A break from the Bollywood “masala” films she usually watched. Then we saw a documentary about dolphin poaching, and since then she had become resistant to attempts to get her to watch anything educational.

  “I don’t need to see how sad the world is,” she explained. It was a difference between us that didn’t take long to become noticeable. The fact I wanted to see things for what they were, while she wanted to pretend they were something else.

  I was walking around the tanks, holding the plans of the experiment, checking again the procedural details, when the phone rang. “Dr. Santosh Mistry speaking,” I said.

  I received in reply a rush of wind. I glanced at the lawn through the window: the leaves on the trees were stiff and rested. “Hello?” I repeated.

  “It’s Sapna!”

  I was frightened by the excitement in her voice. “What’s wrong? What’s that noise?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. The doctor just called—my test results are clear.”

  I was too surprised to answer immediately. Not by the news, but by her calling to share it and the giddiness in her voice. It was a tone she used with her friends, when they visited, or with her brothers, whom she video-chatted with every few weeks, not a voice I was used to her directing at me.

  “That is very good news,” I said. The wind whistled louder—maybe she was in traffic, maybe she was even in the minivan, finally making use of it. I pressed the receiver hard against my ear.

  “We can talk about it more later,” she said. The giddiness was beginning to recede, as if she had remembered I was on the other end of the line.

  “More?”

  “Yes. I have to go now. The light’s changed.” The phone call ended. I wondered where she was going.

  That night, before we went to sleep, Sapna brought up the “more” that she wanted to talk about. She wanted me to join her at the temple on Saturday morning. Even though the baby would not be born with a major disorder, the doctor said there was still a fifty percent chance he or she would be a carrier, like me.

  Praying was a habit of Sapna’s, but not mine. After we married and she moved in, she set up a small shrine in the kitchen. She said she was used to waking up to the smell of sandalwood and the music of religious song, a claim I found dubious. “You did this at university?” I asked, but she didn’t like that I pressed. It was a fair question: it was hard to imagine her praying in her dorm room at Queen’s, which had a reputation as the biggest party school in Canada. Her experience at a university with a more relaxed culture was something Sapna and I shared in common: we had both grown up in Delhi but completed our schooling here, which was why our parents thought we would be a good match.

  When she brought up the subject of the temple, I tried to formulate the kind of calm, reasoned argument that could rid Sapna of the notions of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness that she had inherited from her mother. The trouble was seeming sympathetic at the same time, which I always meant to be, but she never believed it to be true. Whatever came to mind had upset her in one way or another in the past, and after assessing the situation, I decided the best thing to do was to go along with her request as an exception.

  “I’ll go to temple if that’s what you want,” I said. The effect was immediate. She closed the physical distance between us, tucking her rounded belly into my side. She fell asleep quickly, but I stayed awake, so unusual was the feeling of her body touching mine.

  There were many temples to choose from in Brampton, but the one Sapna attended was thankfully the most discreet, a low building that could be mistaken for an event hall. Sapna led me to the room that was used as the main prayer space. The men and women were not separated, as it was done in some temples, but sitting together in families. The room was more packed than I expected or hoped. Sapna made a path for us among the worshippers who were seated cross-legged on a large rug. A young mother was forced to lift her toddler to her lap so we could get around. “Shouldn’t we just sit down?” I whispered.

  We sat down at the front edge of the rug, just slightly to the right of a low stage, so that we had a clear view. The platform was about a foot off the ground: low enough for us to gaze upward respectfully but not painfully. At the back of the platform, sitting in an arc, was a family of gold-coloured statues that included Lord Krishna and Maa Saraswati. Did religion appeal to Sapna because of her education in marketing? It was, I suppose, an example of successful advertising.

  The pundit arrived shortly after us, dressed in a simple yellow tunic and white pants made of cotton. He was less flashy than I had expected. He settled himself at the edge of the stage, so that his toes stuck out—if I stretched my arm forward, I would be able to touch them with my hands. An attendant leaned down to speak to him.

  During that time, I surveyed the room and realized I recognized one of the men seated near the middle of the group. I couldn’t remember his name, but I knew he worked at the university as well, in another department—the arts, I thought. I returned my attention to the pundit. He had started to speak.

  “We are proof that God is inside each of us. And the light of God, the goodness of God, has brought us here today. Together, we will draw upon the God that is within each of us, even those who are not yet born.” Sapna rested a hand on her belly.

  “Together, with the combined power of our voices, we will pray for the health of the Mistry family. Their child, like all children, is a blessing t
hat will soon be a part of us. Let us pray for the health of this child and let us give his parents strength through our prayer.”

  To my credit, I did consider the possibility that the pundit did not mean us, and that there could be other Mistrys present who were also expecting a child. The pundit had said “his” when speaking of the baby, and we didn’t know the sex of our child, so I had more than one reason to believe this. But when I saw the soft way Sapna’s hand rested on her belly and the shine in her eyes, I knew I was wrong.

  Two men and a woman joined the pundit on the stage, sitting behind him with instruments. Their voices light, they began chanting, and the rest of the room joined them, hesitantly at first but then surely. The hall began to sway with singing and with bodies rocking side to side in rhythmic motions. A long time had passed since I had been inside a temple and since I had heard such collective prayers. It conjured a memory not from more recent years but from childhood: the many religious processions that had blocked my way home from school. I passed through them while afraid I would be trampled in the fervour.

  The chanting and then more prayers and then some words from the pundit lasted two hours. The crowd dispersed from the rug and began to mingle. The adults stretched their legs and backs, rubbing their various limbs for circulation, while the children escaped to the foyer outside, from where every now and then came a delighted scream and the skidding of running feet.

  I was proud of the control I managed. I forced myself to move as slowly as I could. I brought out the car keys from my pocket without jangling them and signalled to Sapna that it was time to leave, but she placed a hand on my forearm. She was smiling, but for the audience, not me. I found her smile nothing but cruel toward me. The pundit approached us, along with an attendant carrying a tray of prashad, food blessed by the gods.