by Kim Echlin
What are you going to name it?
Dexter.
I knew enough not to get going with her. I put out her cup of Maxwell House Instant, her ashtray, her sweetener and whitener. She was taking in my life with jealous fury but she also wanted to be proud of me and to take some credit. Her father got her arrested.
Where’s Dexter come from?
It’s a name we like.
One of their names?
I’m not talking about it.
I am not calling any grandchild of mine Dexter.
C’mon, Ma. Her eyes were convex mirrors and I looked tiny in them. I asked, How did you think up my name?
She put out her cigarette and lit another. I started to flip through the Ladies’ Home Journal, looking for my favourite column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Her turn, His turn, The Counselor’s turn.
Then Ma coughed and said, I never named you Katherine. My mother wrote that on your birth certificate at the hospital.
I set down the magazine and picked up a sugar cube and sucked on it.
She said, They thought you shouldn’t have a foreign name so they did it without asking me. I named you Ming. Henry liked it. It means precious. I looked it up in a book at the library. By the time I got out of Belmont and got you back, Katie was the only name you knew. You cried all the time for the foster-woman. You sat on the floor with your back to me and you would not answer to Ming. I gave in. I shouldn’t have. I should have kept calling you Ming. It’s a pretty name.
A dark pinhole opened in the centre of me as if Ma had taken a photograph I did not want. I was not going to let her pain be mine. I was never going to let people walk on me like that. I was going to do better. Keep my baby. Protect it. But she had named me. A name my father liked.
She bounced her foot, said sharp-edged, You should reconsider. Dexter sounds like a kitchen appliance. I’ll call him Sammy.
I could see she was going to claim the baby. I wanted T to claim it. And I was hiding from social workers because I was afraid that they would claim it.
Dexter did not come fast. I got on the bus to the Henderson after my water broke and signed myself in and my labour lasted fourteen hours. A nurse told me to stop hollering and they gave me an injection and tied me down. They called it twilight sleep. I didn’t know what was happening to me. When I woke up I had marks on my wrists from struggling. Dexter had marks on his little head from the forceps. My baby and I had given each other new lives and we both got beat up doing it. By the time I woke up, Ma had come and gone back to work, but T was there, grinning, and though I remembered nothing, I felt happy and groggy and relieved.
He got me up and we went along the hall and looked at Dexter with all the other babies in cots through the glass windows. A nurse behind us said, They’re kids themselves, and her friend answered, Well, it’ll be a long row to hoe being mixed like that.
No one was going to talk that way around my baby and I turned, but T pulled me in tight, said in a low voice, Don’t mind them, babe. We’re beyond colour.
I loved him so much.
I was startled by the pain of the milk coming in and startled at the relief as the baby sucked and I was glad to have T’s arms around me holding our baby, like we were stacking dolls. That first time nursing Dexter, staring into his inquiring eyes, that moment, right then, was precious.
T went back on the road. I was lonely and I missed the band but I was fascinated with Dexter and what had happened to me and I set up my days to keep things interesting. I took him down the street to the Connaught every morning to see Ma, to see Harold and his musicians, to the park, to the big library. Lots of times Ma came after work and said, Get out for an hour. Go do your shopping. I know what it’s like.
The nights were longest and that was when I sat by the window looking over the cenotaph and said to myself, You have to make the best of the cards you get.
I started writing down my tunes. When Dexter cried I could squeeze in a few more notes, put it down and pick it up again. When T came home, it always felt like a celebration and I pulled him to me, smelling of cigarettes and beer and his sax. I loved falling asleep together, T ’n me and Dex. Sometimes T took a little suck and a nibble from my breasts. You leave that for your baby, I said, and found better things for him. All that sticky, birthy, sexy stuff was messy, and I said to T, I’m so happy I feel like I should pay you, and he answered, If you gave me a penny, I’d owe you the change.
I did everything at once, ran over the notes for “Money Jungle” in my head, changed Dex, planned our dinner. I held him and wrote and I looked deep into his eyes and sang and made his lips mirror mine and still I was thinking of my next note. I said to T, Let’s have another quick so Dex won’t be alone, and T who never could be bothered with birth control said, Suits me. Not quite a year later, I had King Jimmie. Then, when I was twenty-two, I had Bea, my daughter, and that was the end of it.
Ma said, Don’t have any more babies, Katie. I know a woman doctor down by the train station. She’s eighty-four years old. She’ll give you the pill.
I’d heard about that but I thought it was illegal and I asked Ma how she knew about her.
I went to her too.
Why?
Guess.
That gave me something to think about.
Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw had short curly white hair and a wide mouth that was mostly closed and serious and when her lips opened into a smile, there were dimples in her cheeks. From behind her frameless glasses her eyes looked right into you and a deep crease between her eyebrows up from her right eye deepened when she was listening to your heart. She was a no-nonsense kind of person. She asked, How can I help you today?
I said, I have three children and I don’t want any more. She said, That seems reasonable.
I heard birth control is illegal.
She smiled and said, People say Planned Parenthood is for heretics and devils. She paused and said, I’m a devil. I will give you a prescription for the pill. Take one a day and don’t forget. It’s for regulating your periods. There, that made it legal. Come back and see me in a year, or if you have any problems. What do you do, by the way?
Mop up most of the time but I’m a jazz musician.
Where do you play?
With three it’s hard to get out much.
Well, find a babysitter and get out and play.
I have one. I trade piano lessons for her kids because I don’t have a cent to pay her.
Well, I’ll be watching for you. I like music.
I told T I wanted to come back and play with the band. He said, Katie, we already got a piano player, and you got three babies.
When I went back to Bagshaw the following year for more pills she asked me how the music was going and I told her about T and the band.
She said, Well, you know, when I went to register for medical school the men told me to go stand in the line for nurses but I didn’t budge. Start your own band.
II
The Visible Life
MAHSA
No one knew my name. It did not feel good but it felt compelling. I walked into my small single room in the Royal Victoria College, partway up the mountain with a great cross at the top. Our dead are in us but in Montreal I could forget mine for a while. I thought, I can do anything.
I fell asleep and I woke up in the dark, still in my clothes from the plane, sticky, a stain on my blouse where I had spilled a glass of juice. I liked flying alone and I had asked my seatmate why we were bouncing in the air and he said, Clouds probably, and this was a new way of thinking about clouds. Here the world smelled foreign, and I took Kamal’s T-shirt out of my suitcase and sniffed it and put it back and closed the case to safeguard its scent of salt and sea and his skin, the smell of us together. I was famished. I was a child of hotels so I walked down to Sherbrooke and west to the Ritz-Carlton and into the lounge. No one came. Where were the servants? Sleeping in some corner? Then I thought, Mahsa, you sound like Uncle.
I walked over to the des
k. Excuse me, I’d like to order something to eat.
A young woman said, I’m sorry, the kitchen is closed. How dare they? I was a guest. At the Beach Luxury someone would be woken. And I started to cry.
She asked, What’s wrong?
I’m sorry. It is my first night here and I have come from Pakistan and I am going to McGill and I don’t know where to go.
She picked up the phone and spoke in French and said to me, They’re bringing some tea and bread. I go to McGill too. My name is Monique.
In this way I met my best friend in Montreal and began the marvellous first days of my student life. I bought jeans like the other girls, wore my hair loose, watched students dancing the Popcorn like James Brown and learned to dance rock and roll with boys, not only girls as I did at home. Uncle had chosen for me studies in English and math but I wanted to study music.
Monique said, Change.
But what if Uncle finds out?
It will be too late. De toute façon, it is your life.
This idea felt strange but I dropped all my courses except one English because I liked the teacher, a writer called Professor MacLennan, and I started music and practised piano in the small rooms of the music building with its mad, shaitanic din and its enormous statue of Queen Victoria out front. I did things because I wanted to and because there was no one to stop me. I watched a human dissection in the medical school. The big toe of the cadaver made a deep impression on me. From it hung the naked and nameless corpse’s number. I went with Monique to a bar on Crescent Street that had Allen Jones furniture shaped like buttocks and breasts which imprinted on my mind like the cadaver’s big toe.
I walked on the mountain and watched wild squirrels running on streets and saw trees coloured orange and red and gold-brown like Mor’s old veranda chair. I learned the names of streets and buildings, so many royals and saints.
There was no Aunt telling me not to make a noise as I crossed a room, and there were no nuns teaching us to listen. In Montreal, girls sat cross-legged on the floor in their jeans, put their heels up on desks, let their breasts show through their T-shirts. They snuck boys into our residence and everyone saw and did not see and there was no real danger. They kissed on the street. What if I had met Kamal here?
On Friday afternoons, I followed my English teacher to his office after class and we talked about books and I watched the light disappear outside and snow crystals sparkle like Shigar Valley topaz in the darkness. He was kindly and tall and courtly and he made me think of Abbu if he had grown old with his easy smile and his interest in me. He had written many books but the one I liked best was called Two Solitudes and it was about love and loyalty and families in trouble. He drank from a little silver flask and he said to me, You’re welcome to borrow my books if you like.
I sat across the desk from him and said, You are my best teacher.
Well, he said. Thank you.
I knew that his wife had died and I knew that he had loved her deeply because he wrote about her, and when I read the essay I felt the way I used to feel when I watched Abbu and Mor dancing. I wanted to tell him that but he was a great writer and I did not know how to say it. I wanted to say something that would interest him.
I said, My country has many solitudes too.
He nodded and took another drink and said, Perhaps you will one day write about that.
I was pleased but I shook my head and said, Oh, no. I want to play music.
That is what you will do, then. Time for me to go home.
I walked to the Ritz to meet Monique when she got off her shift. She studied theatre and I went to plays and dances with her and she did not know my parents were murdered and she did not treat me carefully but with the liveliness of real friendship.
I told her about the great poet Khadija whose brothers wanted to stop her from falling in love. She wrote her lover’s name in her poetry—Abu Marwan, I cannot stop flying out of myself to reach you—and when her brothers read his name they killed him. But after he was dead she kept writing his name.
Monique said, Lovers always die—Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde—c’est comme ça.
But women here are free, I said.
Tu penses! My mother barely spoke English and had seven of us and scrubbed and went to church. My father drank. The women in my neighbourhood took pills and played cards and read romans d’amour and passed their rage down to me. Is this better than your lover Abu quoi?
I laughed, said, Same donkey, different saddle.
Kamal wrote, I do not want to tell you about my life in the military. After I am finished I will work on building schools.
He missed me, wanted me, loved me.
When I saw his handwriting, I felt my blood throb the way it used to when I first saw him each time we met. I wrote back, described some of the new things I had seen, but I did not say much for fear that it would somehow get back to Uncle.
I studied Bach and jazz composition and outside of class I was listening to the Vedic drone in Coltrane’s “India,” to Ravi Shankar and the Beatles. I heard George Harrison and his harmoniums and I was thinking about sacred qawwali. My new friends in Montreal took up swarmandal and sitar and tambura. Girls here played men’s instruments and nothing happened to them. People said things like the ragas could make rain and cure the ill and I thought that this was blasphemy but the world did not end.
George Harrison sang in great innocence, Do all without doing. I bought a harmonium and took it to my theory teacher and I said, You play piano and I will play this with you, and he said, It is like an accordion, which I found funny. I said, I want to learn to notate this, and he said, Cool.
I was shocking myself. These were my first moments of musical daringness. I had stepped off a cliff and I was flying, not falling, and the valley below was green for anyone, even me. I was often alone and the air felt empty in Montreal. There were church bells on Sunday mornings but there were no male voices chanting Allahu Akbar reminding us to pray five times a day, even if we did not pray. To not be lonely I went often to the listening library, and the librarian, Anika, used to come and talk with me. She asked me lots of questions about music from home. I listened to odd rhythms and tala, to Irish slip jigs in 9/8 and to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and John McLaughlin riffing on his two-necked guitar with Jean-Luc Ponty. Of course I listened to Santana. Everyone everywhere loved Santana, especially in Karachi.
I listened to the CBC recordings in the library to know who was playing here and I heard Nimmons ’N’ Nine and Mo Billson’s band with a pianist called Katherine Goodnow. Her rhythm was perfect. I played it for Anika who had never heard of her and went to her card catalogue and pulled out little wooden drawers, flipping through white typed cards with numbers and finally came back and said, I can’t find any other recordings of her. The bandleader is still around. And the sax player, Theodore Jones.
Most frightening was my first piano tutorial. Never had I had any real lessons, only Abbu and my own ears. At my first lesson I played note for note something I heard on a Shankar recording. My professor had a beautiful half-French, half-English name, Jean St. John. He wore jeans and a tight T-shirt and a brown corduroy shirt open over it and brown leather sandals and his feet were not clean. His dark hair was shaggy over his collar and touched the top of his metal-framed glasses. He paced when he entered a room, looking for the place he would be, like a dog circling before it lies down, and he picked up the wooden chair and straddled it, resting his arms and chest on the straight back. He chain-smoked Camel cigarettes. He was known in the faculty as a genius double bass player who tuned his bass in fifths to get to the purest sounds, so low most people could not hear them. I play for the underworld, he liked to say, I have sympathy for the devil. A few of the students told me I was lucky to have him in my first year. A girl who was not chosen to study with him said to another girl so I could hear, Foreign students are taking over, it shouldn’t be allowed. I was nervous playing for Jean St. John and my fingers shook, the first time this ever
happened to me. He listened for a few moments and then he swung off his chair as if he were getting out of a saddle and he dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it and walked to the door. He said, Play with your eyes closed. Play backwards. I don’t care how the hell you do it, but make it yours. Use your own ideas. See you next week.
I sat for a moment, then got up and looked out the window and I thought, What am I doing here? Uncle did not want me to study music. My professor walked out on me. I was startled by such rudeness as if someone had slammed a door, but in fact, he had opened one. I looked around the room, still and tiny and quiet, and I put my hands back on the keys to try again. What were my own ideas? I had no idea what my ideas were.
Later I told Monique, At home we have to repeat, to learn the tradition.
She laughed, Here everyone wants to be original. Don’t worry about it. Listen, come on Friday night and play standards at the hotel and make some money. You can play however you like. It’s only for drunks.
I arrived at the Ritz and sat down at the Steinway near the curved staircase. This hotel piano felt familiar, like at the Beach Luxury, except fancier. I started to play and I loved the sound of overtones I had not heard before and Monique slipped out from behind the desk and put a dish with a five-dollar bill on the piano and some men listened and put a few more bills in it. The manager watched them order drinks and he came over to the piano and said, Mademoiselle, if you want to come back next Friday you can play again and keep the tips.
I showed Monique all the money I made and she said, You have to give it back. The men were friends of mine, actors, so the manager would let you stay. Don’t you have something more dramatic to wear?
I showed her a gold sari that revealed my midriff and I wore my hair loose. She said, Yes, yes, try that, and the next week I walked through the lounge and sat down and people who were not Monique’s friends were staring. I myself slipped five dollars in the bowl and soon someone put some money in, a quarter, the first money I ever earned playing piano. A man who was drunk with his arm over a woman’s bare shoulders asked me to play “All the Things You Are” which I knew, but when other people began to ask for tunes I did not know I had to ask them to hum and I would follow and chord. Someone said, Give her a break. They don’t have this music in India. Someone else asked, Are you Indian? I said, I’m from Pakistan. I will play you something from there. The little group of men around the piano were laughing and drinking and Monique got off her shift and said, I should be your manager.
