Fiction Archives - Rungh Cultural Society

Waliullah Is Lost

Rungh Editor — Sun, 14 May 2023 06:19:50 +0000

Waliullah Is Lost

Short Story by Zubair Ahmad

By Zubair Ahmad
Translation by Anne Murphy

From Grieving for Pigeons: Twelve Stories of Lahore (Athabasca University Press, 2022).

It was a dull morning, without a hint of sun. We were on our way to school, shivering with cold and hanging our school bags carefully at our waists, moving as quickly as we could. We bantered back and forth as we passed the shops: there was the sweet seller, the old lady with the ink pots, and the gentleman who sells sonf, or anise seed. It was Pheeqa, Kala the black, me, and Waliullah. We were a crew. After everyone gathered for the first prayer, all the boys ran across the big courtyard to their classrooms, in lines. We arrived just in time at the big school gate and ran to catch up with our class. None of the teachers saw us sneak in: there was too much of a ruckus as the boys rushed in after prayers. The teachers gossiped among themselves as usual, too, so they didn't pay us any mind. One had to be careful, though, when rushing in lines like that. If someone pushed someone else out of line from behind, or if someone slow or weak suddenly fell, that child would be beaten. This was our daily routine.

Every day, after entering the class, we ran to our benches. Each of us had our own. In the primary years, we had only a coarse sackcloth to sit on, but there were benches and desks in the higher grades. After we rubbed the cold benches with our school bags to warm them, only one thing came to mind, like a blast of cold air: don't get beaten. Everyone kneaded their hands together and blew on them to keep them warm: the cold was so intense that we could barely hold our pens. In winter, our only desire was not to be beaten in the first or second period. In the intense morning cold, the pain was just too much.

It was time for class with the Urdu teacher, Mr. Altaf. Unlike the rest of us, Mr. Altaf's mother tongue was Urdu. He always wore pure cotton—a long white kurta and pyjama pants—and makesh, a kind of boot. He chewed bright red betel leaf in his mouth, was of medium height, and spoke hesitatingly in an ostentatiously cultured and refined way. He was one of the few teachers who didn't carry a stick in his hands, so the boys weren't too afraid of him.

But he did have his own special method of punishment. He would call a student to him, very close, and would twist the student's ear so forcefully that the boy would twist and turn in front of him. Mr. Altaf wouldn't move a muscle, nor would he allow the boy to move away. Then he would make jokes about it, addressing the class, "He looks like he is enjoying it, don't you think? He's dancing so well!" The boy would be so close to him that his betel leaf–soaked breath would sprinkle deep red juice on the boy's face. Sometimes, for a change, he would pinch a boy on the abdomen instead and stand steady and tall; the boy would twist around, back and forth, and the class would be doubled over with laughter. Of course, if anyone laughed too loud, he'd be called up to the front as well. While pinching the boy, Mr. Altaf would watch the class closely, chewing his betel leaf, as if he were asking for accolades for his special skill. "Look at how beautifully I do my work," he seemed to say. According to him, his method of punishment was both a pragmatic technique and an art. He had earned this skill after working in schools for many years.

But sometimes something else would happen. Trembling with anger, he would ask a boy to bring a stick from the teacher in the adjacent classroom. This would only happen once a year or so. Punishing with a stick wasn't his thing. So, when he did it, it went all wrong. He would beat his victim blindly, screaming abuses, and there seemed to be no end to it. "You fucker! You motherfucker!" he would yell. The class would become deathly silent. As the student left to bring the stick from the other class, Mr. Altaf would walk among the rows of benches and wherever he would stop, it was as if death itself had struck.

This would happen when someone made a joke that crossed the limits of his patience. It happened, for example, when a new oil to grow hair had appeared in the market. It had become quite famous. It was called "Zaidal," or something like that. That day, because of the cold, no one had the heart to open their school bags or books. After taking attendance, as usual, he asked the students to open their books. That's when someone mentioned the oil. Even though it had been whispered, he had heard it. He was bald. And he became very angry. He asked the boy who was sitting in front of our bench, who was also the class monitor, to bring the stick from the next class.

Suddenly, it was as if someone had forced our hands into ice. Not only our class. It seemed as if the whole school was engulfed in silence. When the boy came with the stick, we sat lifeless, as if we had lost our very souls. We all knew the joke had been made by the son of Phaje the butcher. At the end of eighth grade, he quit school and started working in his father's shop in the bazaar.

Mr. Altaf walked once or twice between the benches and then came and stood near us. Our hands were already numb at even the thought of a beating. When I think of it today, it seems to me that perhaps Waliullah had moved a bit, or that he didn't have the same kind of fear on his face that the rest of us had. It was rare that he would be chosen. But that day our Mr. Altaf asked Waliullah to come out, gesturing with his stick. His face turned red with fury and betel juice seeped from his lips. Waliullah continued to look at him as before. His face was unreadable.

When Mr. Altaf decided to deliver his punishment, there was no question of justice. Whether someone was guilty or not, he would suffer. In reality, Mr. Altaf usually didn't have a clue about who had made mischief. He would just call a boy up to the front of the class, any boy, and beat that boy blindly; anyone he called upon had to put out his hands for the beating. If a boy tried to speak up or say something in his own defence, the beating would be all the more severe.

Mr. Altaf raised his stick and Waliullah put forward his hands. The beating began, and it continued. We sat there, frozen. Some boys from other classes watched stealthily from the door. Waliullah was beaten just past the threshold. Only God knows what happened to Mr. Altaf: he struck with rage, with fury, and at last Waliullah's hands began to hang limply. His eyes filled with tears. But brave Waliullah! He neither wept nor cried out. The stick broke after the hundred-and-second strike. Silence engulfed the school. By recess, everyone knew. "Waliullah has been beaten!" Everyone said his name loudly, stretching it out. He silently left school. His hands were swollen and red, and someone had covered them with a handkerchief. Until he left for home, we blew over his hands, with the handkerchief over them, soothingly. He did not move them.

Waliullah was our friend, our companion, the connecting tissue of our group. He was short in stature and a bit frail. He lagged behind the other boys in class. His nose was long like a parrot's, and on his head he always wore a filthy cap, the kind used by those who perform the namāz, or Muslim prayers. He always bowed his head down as he walked, as if something had fallen and he was looking for it; then his nose would look even longer. He was the most gentle and good-hearted among us. He was so weak that he couldn't even play some of our games. When we would play, he would sit near us and act as a judge or take care of our shoes or other things. Whenever some disagreement arose in a game, he was the one to decide what was fair.

The boys from the higher grades also respected him, but not for the reasons we did. He was looked up to because of his ability to call on God's power, chanting Qur'anic verses and then blowing on a person's forehead as a blessing. This was why everyone called him "Waliullah," the friend of God. His real name was something else. A boy would lean his forehead towards him and say, "Waliullah, blow on my forehead." Waliullah would stand very seriously, clasp the boy's forehead gently, and after reciting something under his breath, blow on it. That warm and gentle puff on the forehead seemed to reach deep inside. The boys were so enamoured of this that sometimes they would crowd around him and, one by one, come forward, stepping back only after receiving his special breath. Most of them did it so that with this, perhaps they might be saved from being beaten. Some must have had other wishes, too. There was trust, warmth and comfort in Waliullah's breath.

Now that he had beaten Waliullah so severely, we all were sure Mr. Altaf would not be spared. "How could he have beaten Waliullah?" Then the expected happened. We reached school the next morning and found that it was closed. Mr. Altaf's wife had died. Now everyone repeated Waliullah's name with awe. Instead of going to Mr. Altaf's home to pay condolences, half the school went to Waliullah's home to enquire after his health. Everyone from the school wanted to feel his breath upon them. Even women from the mohallah started to seek out his blessing. After that, he was never beaten again. We came to know many years later that Mr. Altaf's wife had tuberculosis, and she had already been very sick for a long time. But that didn't matter.

Waliullah was not only my classmate; he also lived in my mohallah. I can't say now how long we had been friends. It seems to me that we always were. After the partition of Punjab in 1947, our fathers used to sit together every evening in Tufail's tailor shop. I remember that there was a large low wooden table, and on one side a sewing machine and an iron that would be warmed by coals: the hookah was prepared from the coals used to heat the iron, or sometimes the hookah's coals were used to prepare the iron. In this way, the two lent each other smoke. Tufail the tailor never measured any of his customers. He would just look at a person carefully, or he might put his hand on the man's or child's shoulder, examine him from head to foot and say, "You can have your clothes day after tomorrow." In the Daultana years, just after Partition, people would gather there in the evening after work for news of Amritsar and Gurdaspur on the Indian side; this continued on through the Ayub regime, Bhashani's leadership in East Pakistan, and then Bhutto's time at the helm. All these politicians and politics came and went. All the black turned grey. Then Tufail's shop was closed, and a medical store opened in its place. Now there is a big bakery there, with huge glass windows.

When school finally finished, we waited for our results. In those days in Lahore, special editions of newspapers were published with the results of the final exams at the end of grade 10, and news hawkers called out loudly to sell copies. When the news finally came, we found out that Waliullah had failed. We felt no joy over how we did or didn't place. We couldn't bear the grief of Waliullah's failure. We sat together in silence on the side of the road, in the centre of the mohallah, for a long time. Back then you could hire a bicycle for just a few pennies, four or eight annas, per hour. We were so upset that we hired bicycles and rode like mad all over the city. Cycling frantically, we tired ourselves out, but we still found no peace. It used to be deserted beyond Bund Road, at the edge of the city. There were thick trees and fields. Among them were some wells, the barking of dogs, and the tolling of bells. We went and sat at one of the wells. Pheeqa brought out a packet of Woodbine cigarettes, which he had stolen from his father. We all lit up cigarettes and became exhausted from coughing. But even then, we could not relax. We had no idea that from that time on we would never be relaxed again, that this pain was only the beginning. Some of us went on to university, and one suddenly left for Karachi. Another was sent abroad by his father. Some took care of their fathers' shops, others became bus conductors, and someone joined an office. One or two boys went back to their villages. There were just a few of us left who knew each other from those days. It seemed like the whole world changed.

Waliullah's father had a book-binding shop. What a place it was! Built on a pile of dirt in a corner of one of the narrow lanes in the main market, it was just a kiosk of tin and wood, attached to a small two-story house they lived in. Children's magazines, detective novels, political and other magazines, old and new, all used to hang there as the book-binding work carried on. In the evening, the shop was transformed into a gathering place for people to gossip and discuss politics. When Waliullah's father grew old, his son took charge of the shop. That is how it was supposed to be, so that is how it was. At the same time, Waliullah's sisters needed to be married off, and it seemed to us that Waliullah had become even more frail from the heavy burden he carried. Then we, too, were forced to leave the mohallah. I never thought it would happen to us, but it did, and then to Waliullah as well.

I used to visit the old neighbourhood once or twice every year, and whenever I went, I would visit Waliullah's shop. He had turned completely grey and was even thinner and smaller. His cap was even muddier than before. His father was bedridden. One or two sisters had been married, and one or two, perhaps not. He himself had gotten married, too, and had children. The old mohallah and marketplace in Lahore had changed. The price of land had skyrocketed. The bazaar filled with people. Whenever I used to visit, there were always one or two new shops—but if one thing remained unchanged, it was Waliullah's shop. But the building was under dispute. After Partition, as a refugee from the now-Indian side of Punjab, his father had occupied the upper portion of the house. Someone else took up its lower portion. The case regarding who was the rightful owner had been in court ever since. Waliullah was very worried about it. There were other problems with the shop as well: things and places that used to be secured through long-standing personal relationships were being torn apart under the onslaught of the new cash economy. When I would sit in his shop, we would talk about the old days. The place was tiny. Showing me to a stool, he would call for tea. The tea would be served in a glass, with a small saucer. He would pour half the tea into the saucer and give me the glass. Then, it was as if he opened the book of the mohallah to read from, and he would start to talk.

"A year has gone by since Fareeda came home. One day, there she was, with three children. She asked about you, and I said I didn't know where you were. Lali sold his house and moved to Defence, in the new part of town. We heard that they built a big house there. It looks like Lali's father had his hands in a lot of things . . . Kala is still operating a printing press, and he probably always will. Pheeqa opened a hardware shop, and his wife is a schoolteacher. She never leaves him in peace. But then again, he never managed to say much before, anyway. Sukky has given into heroin. Pakaure—he used to love eating those salty snacks!—spent two months in jail after stabbing the son of the goldsmith. Naifey's fish shop is doing very well; he was the oldest in the family. Dullah still hasn't settled down yet. He has left his life of crime behind, but he still has no steady job. He was saying that he might start selling chickens. Aftikar Allahi became a senior officer in a bank." So many things to discuss, to finish up with.

Then time passed, and I hadn't had a chance to visit the old mohallah for a long while. Finally, one day when I happened to be in the area, I went to Waliullah's shop. But I couldn't find it. Part of me was not surprised: places in this part of the city change like newly rich relatives. I looked closely and now shoes were being sold where his shop used to be, and another person was sitting in his place. Women and children were standing around, waiting to buy something. There was never such a crowd at Waliullah's shop. I asked the new shopkeeper about what became of Waliullah, but he didn't answer; instead, he got annoyed and said he didn't have time to talk. "Besides," he added, "why are you asking about him?" Inquiring at many shops, I finally reached Bashir Hamam, who ran a hamām and barber shop. When the first public protest movement against President Ayub was launched, Bashir was the first in the whole market to hang a photo of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in his shop. One time, people from the Islamist party came to vandalize his bathhouse, and he had stood alone in front of it, holding a naked razor. No one dared to come near. This made him very famous in the bazaar, so much so that during the first election, when Bhutto visited the area, Bashir posed with him and others for a photo that he displayed in his shop from then on. But now, I saw, Bashir had grown very old. Most of the work was done by boys, and he would just help to bring soap and towels to customers. I asked: "Do you recognize me?" He replied: "Even if you came after one hundred years, I would recognize you. I cut your hair for twenty-three years."

There was a flash in his eyes when I asked about Waliullah. "How long has it been since you last came around? He lost the court case over his house, and those people threw his things out into the street." He continued: "People say that some big gangster was involved or that someone bribed someone. Anyway, no one did anything about it. It was just a small shop. I heard that he got a bit of money by selling off things from it and is now living in some place called the ‘Township.' It's a new neighbourhood, not yet fully built." Bashir didn't have the exact address. Then he quoted something Waliullah had once said: "I have lived here fifty years, and it came to nothing."

"I have grown old," Bashir said, starting to become angry. "What can I do? I was barely able to save this place myself. They were after it too. God knows where they get their forged papers. Land is like gold, Bairy, just like gold." He kept on talking, calling me by my childhood name.

"I had advised Waliullah's father to buy some land. It was so cheap back then. But he was always busy with politics. He was a great lover of the People's Party government. And Bhutto, too. He adored them, just like I did. But what did the People's Party do for us?"

I couldn't listen to Bashir any longer, so I left him. Waliullah was gone.

It doesn't mean anything, but sometimes, when I am going to work on a cold winter morning, I imagine Waliullah before me. I place my grey head in his hands and say, "Oh, Waliullah! Breathe. Give me your blessing!"

Zubair Ahmad is the author of two poetry collections, three short story collections, a translation, and a collection of essays, all written in Punjabi. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

Anne Murphy teaches in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the Punjab region of India and Pakistan.

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The Send Off

Rungh Editor — Wed, 19 May 2021 18:23:16 +0000

Vol. 8, No. 4 / Fiction

The Send Off

Short Story by M. G. Vassanji

By M.G. Vassanji

In the evenings after dinner the five of us would gather around her in the living room. We were Firoz, the eldest, my sisters Naila and Safia, myself, and Salim, the youngest. Mother would be sitting on her large bed, both legs pulled up, one crossed and the other stretched out in front, cutting patterns from a bolt or two for the next day’s sewing, or catching up on her bookkeeping. The large six-band radio atop our display cabinet was the other focal point of the room, playing Hindi or English songs, and bringing us news from the BBC, which also told us the exact time, “eighteen hours Greenwich Mean Time,” by which to set our clock for nine p.m. Dar es Salaam. All the day’s news we would discuss then and enthusiastically greet the songs as they were announced, especially those of Elvis or Connie Francis or Cliff Richard. Our best evenings were when Mother or Naila told a story, Mother from her younger days, Naila something she’d brought back from school.

Now in another world a continent and an ocean away we had gathered by her bed once more, this time to help release her from her life—as the righteous euphemism puts it—but in fact to watch her finally die. To watch and cheer, I couldn’t help thinking. It’s all over and done, the burden has lifted from our lives. The solemnity at the nursing home felt as false as a badly acted drama. This was celebration.

The doctor was reached on the phone and said to increase the morphine. The duty nurse looked at me, I turned to my cousin, a former nurse. Maimuna nodded, “It will make it easier for her.” I said, “Yes, okay.” The syringe went in.

It had fallen upon me to decide whether or not to give her a chance to revive; two years ago I had said let’s wait, everyone agreed, and she revived. And told more stories. But this time a sense of finality had come over us, the hovering angel of death had been allowed to descend. People justify with all sorts of reasons end-scenes such as this; ours was: old age, it’s time. Leading busy lives, we had little time for her and had grown weary of waiting. And it was quite apparent that the home needed another bed.

I don’t want to wallow in guilt, nor do I wish to excuse myself. I’ve learned irony and I wish simply to record the death of my mother. And to remember her a little, allow that other world to tug at me before it’s completely vanished.

I went to stand at the door, before me this scene at her bedside, behind me the long empty corridor bright with a fluorescent sunshine reflected cheerlessly off the yellow walls. My two sisters were beside the bed on one side, my cousin and my wife Jena on the other, and at the foot sat Mariam, the woman who came to help her for one hour every day. She would not have missed this finale. She had earned it. My two brothers, both out of town, had yet to arrive.

Mother’s face looked surprisingly radiant, as she lay under a blanket breathing in shallow rapid gurgles, the air making its tortured way through her congested trachea. An oxygen tube ran under her nose. She had been returned from hospital at my say-so and upon the ER resident’s recommendation. Was it worth, after a few hours of lying on a gurney in a hospital corridor, putting her through the extra ordeal of an insertion up her nose to clear her breathing passages? “We’ll take her back, then,” I pronounced, after a moment’s hesitation, feeling only slightly coerced with a tightness in the stomach. The resident, a young woman, had looked relieved. It was two in the morning, and more stretchers had queued up in the corridor.

Her breathing became lighter, and the four women in the room, at Mariam’s practiced instigation (“She’s ready to go”), began chanting fervently all together—Allahuma salli ala …— their faces pinched, their eyes lowered, swaying backward and forward. The room filled up with the chorus. God bless the Prophet, indeed, but my mother was having none of this. She was a stubborn woman. Her face, still radiant at her age, was composed, her lips were just open, and I swear I saw the familiar grim smile on her face, and I imagined her saying, I’m not going yet, you pray as much as you like. That voice. They gave up after a while and sat back cheerfully to chat. False alarm. I returned to sit down with them at the bedside.

In lowered voices we told stories about her, marvelled at her eventful life and resilience, her funny ways in the last couple of years; and we recalled stories about each other when we were young. This dying moment had brought us closer, we who had lived eight people to two rooms as children, but recently had so little time to see each other. She had gathered us, as we gathered around her when we were children.

That scene of my mother’s last hours in the nursing home lingers: the change in breathing, the frantic piety of the cheerleading, her refusal to go, and the resumption of chatter. This rigmarole was repeated three times, and each rehearsal it brought an irreverent smile to my face. Perhaps I was a bit hysterical in the circumstances and simply wished to laugh out my tension. What were the prayers for? I suppose—no longer believing in them—they were to ease the soul’s passage out; but it seemed more a way of pushing it through in a collective heave-ho: There you go, Mummy, no point sticking around; it’s going to happen, let it happen. Go.

We’ve become a practical lot in Canada. We like to do things with maximum efficiency and little fuss.

The gentle lines on her old-pretty face bore all the versions of her that I could recall over the years, one image impressed upon another. And as I watched her, the frantic prayers failing to coax her into leaving, I couldn’t help thinking, You show them Mummy! You’ll go when you are ready. Give me some time.

In the Indian tradition, sons look after their parents when they get old. They are also favoured. I, the second-youngest, was her favourite, her laal. So she would say to me. So I believed. She became a widow at thirty-three when my father died of a sudden heart attack. She never remarried; to do so— and she had good off , I know now—would have been to abandon her children to adoption. Others drowned unwanted infant girls in milk, our widows were asked to give up their children in order to remarry. She liked to tell the story of Shravan, the young man who would carry both his old parents on his shoulders to take them for their pilgrimages; one day in a forest he put them down to rest under a tree by a river, and as he stepped to the water and bent down to take a sip, a king who was out on a hunt mistook him for a deer and shot him with an arrow. I was never quite certain what the lesson was, but evidently Shravan was a devoted son, just as she was the devoted mother who had foregone a secure life with companionship for our sakes. When the great Indian epic Mother India came to town, she sent us all to watch it. She herself, minding her store, must have been the only Asian woman who never saw it. The story was about a widow who, despite her travails, and the harassment of lecherous men, brought up her boys as responsible, upright citizens in the new India.

One evening when we were all gathered in the sitting room, she as usual on her bed with scissors and cloth, the radio playing song requests, she said to me, “No, Karim, you won’t look after me when you’re grown up, you’ll just throw me aside.” I must have boasted of my undying devotion to her and therefore protested with all my ten-year-old’s indignation, “Of course I will! I will always look after you, Mummy!” To prove which I wrote down a note promising precisely that: When I grow up I will always look after Mummy. And I signed it, and she put it in her bosom with a smile. My promissory note, my hundi. But at twenty I went to America to study and we never lived together again. I wonder why she let me go, using all her savings for the plane ticket; and I wonder where my note ended up. It was never mentioned again in my presence, perhaps out of kindness to me.

In Toronto, no matter who else had visited her, if her laal had not arrived yet, she would observe, simply, “No one came, today.” And when I walked in, she’d announce, “Look, Karim has arrived.” To any nurse who happened to be around, she would proudly point at me: “My son.” Inevitably my wife Jena, if she was with me, would complain afterwards, “You see! She didn’t even notice me,” and with sinking heart—for I had hoped she hadn’t noticed—I would explain, “She is old.” I have often wondered, Why do we take abuse from our children yet not tolerate an aged parent’s slightest oversights?

She had been practically bundled off to the nursing home by Naila and Firoz. One Sunday I saw her in her apartment, frail but on her feet, and she made me tea. The following week she was in a wheelchair by her bed in the home, looking dazed in an alien world, her lips compressed. She didn’t speak a word. This was not what she had consented to. Later, often, she’d pronounce, “It’s a prison.” A qaid-khano. She who had always been independent, negotiating a man’s world. And so it was hardly surprising to come upon her once in a while saying, “Send me back to Dar es Salaam, I can look after myself.” She would have stayed up half the night nursing this resolve and making her plans. We would laugh and cajole, “Mummy, you can’t even get up from your wheelchair!”

“I can.”

It was not a bad place, the home; it was clean, and the dining room was small and not crowded; the corridors were not crammed with old folks drooling or crying, as in the other places we had seen. But which nurse attended her on any given day was the luck of the draw; there were some who were kind and called her mother, and others who could easily have stood guard at a concentration camp. The home was there to break you if you had not already given up the will to live. When I saw Mother being heaved by two strong nurses into the cradle of a machine to be lifted like a sack, I wanted to run down the corridor and scream. Nobody deserved this. I was never around again to witness this sight.

–

We can recall hardships, existence at disaster’s edge when every penny counted, moments when the elder siblings fought so viciously that Mother, in desperation, threatened to walk away to the sea, less than a mile away, and drown herself. No, Mummy, please! We’ll be good! Don’t go. Moments when she simply sat down and beat her chest raw and wept. Yet none of us would now say our life was unhappy. We fondly recall the best parts, are aware of the bonds we formed, and would rather not pause to examine the scars. We had been sent to school and in the end survived and thrived. She on the other hand ailed and decayed, became gradually alone and unhappy, unwanted—and was finally relegated to the nursing home to break and die.

I recall her sitting on her high stool behind the counter of her corner shop, looking over the two doorways, brooding, picking her chin. After many experiments she ended up specializing in children’s clothes; the customers were our African neighbours. Except for a few days at every month’s end, and during the month of Ramadan, business was slow. Over the fifteen years she ran the shop, she spent all her capital, which was the small insurance benefi she had received after my father’s death, but we all completed high school. Two of us went to university. Mother herself had quit school after grade six, because, as she told the story many times, her father withdrew her, saying, What’s the use of so much learning? She had cried. She could have been a teacher, like the ones I had in my early years, who had barely two years more of schooling than she.

There are things about our parents’ lives that we are not equipped to notice until we ourselves grow up and they hit us, stark epiphanies. Then we see the darker side of the world we came from. Of the few hundred shops run by Asians in our town, hers was the only one run by a woman. A young, pretty widow with small children and little money. Years later when she let slip a remark, I realized the obvious, that it was a man’s world she had negotiated through, facing the sly comment, the lascivious look, the obscene suggestion when she was late in her instalments to the collectors who came by every so often. She always took me or my younger brother with her when she went to purchase from the wholesalers, and later when we were barely in our teens she sent the two of us on our own to deal with the men. She faced the humiliation of having to ask the tailor next door to mind her shop so she could go upstairs to our flat to use the toilet, the rest of us being in school. Early every morning she cooked our dinner, and sent us off to school. She opened shop at eight in the morning, closed at six in the evening. At night she sat on her bed and did her cutting from the patterns she carried in her head, occasionally she’d bring out the ledger book and invoices. Her older brother, Kassam, had taught her to keep books the Indian way.

Sitting there she would tell us about her childhood in Mombasa, which had been hard, or her marriage in Nairobi, where she had been happy, barring the initial abuse every new daughter-in-law received. Her first achievement was to pay off all my profligate father’s debts. On a few delightful occasions she casually came up with English words none of us children had heard before. Affidavit. Mortuary. And off someone would run to bring the Oxford pocket dictionary to confi . Yes, Mummy does know English! Better than us!

Some Sundays we would take the unpaved back roads to the new suburb of Upanga where my grandmother lived with my uncle Kassam and his family, and in the evenings we would return via dimly lit downtown streets sucking on ices we had bought on the way. And years later, when both my sisters were married and Firoz was away, minding a relative’s store at Kenya’s lonely but dangerous border with Somalia, Salim and I would play three-handed whist with our mother.

She had always missed my father. Standing at our doorway during Firoz’s wedding, the bride and groom being received the morning following the wedding night, there had appeared sudden tears in Mother’s eyes. Why are you crying, Mummy? You should be happy! And she’d say, I wish he were here. As a widow she could not perform the ceremonies required of a mother, so Naila took her place. She saw him in dreams, wearing a suit, when he would pronounce something short to her: How Firoz has grown. Pay the electric bill, dear. But as the years passed she did not mention dreaming of him, or we didn’t ask. Too much was going on in our lives, final examinations, universities, sad departures, marriages.

In the nursing home, however, she saw him a few times. But our dad was now a distant memory, and her own memory was weak. What would he tell her? What she saw clearly, however, was an evil man who took away children and kept them prisoners. Where did he come from?

–

It was immigration that undid her, stole her away from her simple world where she was mistress and made her a prisoner in another. She became useless, a dependent, a victim. Conditions in East Africa in the 1970s intimidated many of its Asians into leaving, and Firoz was one of those who chose to go to Canada, having recently married. He and his wife set off for Vancouver and Mother followed, all three to begin a new life together. Three months later when I called her from my grad student apartment in New York, she broke down. What’s wrong? There was a parrot. What parrot? A parrot can’t hurt you, Mummy! Her voice was thick. She said she felt abused and she wanted to go back home. What went wrong?

She was lonely, she was hungry. There was no one to talk to. If they spoke to her they scolded her. She was crying and I could not console her. The next day she was calmer but sounded hoarse and remained adamant, she wanted to return. I advised Firoz that we should do as she asked, send her back to Salim in Dar es Salaam. He did not argue. A week later when she departed, I came rushing by overnight Greyhound to meet her in Toronto, where she had a stopover. I had last seen Mother back at home, a person of some stature, the caregiver who had brought us all up and could still hold her own as a seamstress; who had sent me abroad for my education, using all her savings for the ticket, and Salim locally to the medical school. The woman I saw at the airport gate that hot July afternoon was someone else. A woman broken—face crumpled and tearful, eyes wide with confusion, hair dishevelled—utterly defeated. Before emigrating, someone had advised her to replace all her teeth with dentures, which would be expensive in Canada, and she had foolishly done so and gained ten years; she was wearing the warm woolen coat she had saved from her younger days in Nairobi, and now she had to take it back with her and there was no room in her luggage. I can’t recall with what feelings I embraced her, clichés come to mind, but that memory of her emerging out of the gate at the airport, looking grotesque and barely recognizable, stops my breath. She was fifty-five, younger than most of us now sitting beside her, egging her on to do her bit and die.

What was it about the parrot, I asked her once, some years later. “She was feeding her parrot all the time but told me I was eating too much.” Her imitations of my sister-in-law Saida, cooing at her parrot, “Here, parrot, eat your foodie …” were actually funny. Mother spoke her mind easily. She came from a place and time where every morsel was counted, and did not understand spending resources on a pet.

A few years afterwards Mother returned to Canada with Salim, the last one to emigrate. Not happy in Calgary in the basement of his large doctor’s mansion, she moved out. It was a mistake. Salim, hinting at his circumstances at home, told me, “If she moves out, she will not be able to return.” Why? I wanted to ask. She’s your mother! But the rejoinder was obvious, she was mine too, what was I doing about her? I preferred to live in downtown Toronto in a house too small; she would not have managed the stairs. I would have to convince my family that we should move. Excuses apart, I should face this, I had lived away from her for too many years.

But she did move to Toronto eventually, to her own apartment before ending up here.

–

The doctor comes, gives a quick look around the room, then lands his gaze on my mother. “Did you give her the morphine?” he asks. A middle-aged Chinese man, his hair is ruffled.

There’s no expression on his face. The Filipina nurse who followed him in has gone around to the other side of the bed. “Yes,” she says. “The family consented.” “We should increase it,” the doctor says. He could be checking inventory. He turns around and with a quick nod towards me leaves. We have an understanding.

I had already signed a guardian’s consent not to revive her unless advised. But morphine is that extra step to ease her into death, because we’ve decided against inserting a tube through her nose to help her breathe. She would hate it, I am certain. She would say, I don’t want to live under such conditions. But would she mean that? Did she understand the consent when I explained it? Had I even explained it clearly enough? The morphine seems the right decision to make, we would make it for ourselves if we had to. Still, that doubt remains, to niggle at the mind. Isn’t this too easy? Haven’t we been in a hurry all along? I don’t want to be the one to give the fi go-ahead, Yes, more morphine, let’s gently push her off, but I am the son present, the decision is mine, and the rest are all happy for me to make it. They’re waiting, eyes upon me. It’s all right, it’s what she would have wanted, but you decide. I look at the nurse and give my nod.

She’s calmer, breathing steadily. Mariam, the companion, starts the prayers again. A diminutive woman, much smaller than the others, she carries the authority of experience and piety. Her open palms come together in front of her, her face pinches, and her eyes close. The others follow suit, the heads drop, the chorus begins, Allahuma salli ala … Mariam’s approach has always been practical: Your mother is waiting to go; not, We should make her happy and understand her. When Mother imagined the bogeyman who captured young people and held them prisoners, Mariam advised me that the mind was gone, and the old woman would follow soon. But the mind was not gone. My mother would smile when I came, her face would gradually light up, then we would chat. Sometimes about that bogeyman. I understood exactly who it was that was following her even into death.

My second sister, Safia, made it up to high school graduation, when suddenly Mother convinced her to accept a proposal and married off the eighteen-year-old to a man fifteen years older. Why, when she knew that his first wife had left him only a couple of weeks into the marriage? He was of a wealthy family, and they made promises … they would take care of Safia’s education, give her a better future than our mother ever could … and perhaps she hoped that her lot too would improve? But he was abusive, and all the promises made to us were quickly forgotten. Weeks after the wedding he hit her for not ironing his shirt properly. Mother never forgave herself. An eighteen-year-old given away just like that. My sister could have refused the proposal, but she was young and also swayed by the promises. She could have divorced him, but she stayed for the first child, who came a year later, then the next two.

This, the bogeyman who stole children.

The prayer stops, Mother keeps going. But she has slowed down. Everyone’s noticed, and there’s a hush in the room. The nurse has already gone.

Mum, you should see New York, I’ll take you there! You’ll be wowed—do you know there’s a building there with more than one hundred storeys! Go on, how can that be. Really! If you say so. And I’ll show you my university! All right.

She seems to have surrendered. “All right, it’s time,” someone says. And again the prayers begin, more frantically. I stand up and put my hand on her chest. My awkward goodbye. If only I could have expressed my love more obviously. But you knew it, Mum. I was the laal, after all.

There comes a commotion from outside, an unusual activity breaking the silence, and a few minutes later my brother Salim breezes in with his daughter. Officious as always—the doctor—he asks, “What’s up? She’s on morphine?” We nod. He goes and puts his hand on her head. She stops breathing.

–

An hour later, two young men and a woman from our Funeral Committee arrive and take over. We don’t have to do a thing, they’ll make all the required arrangements. We shouldn’t go near the body, we’re warned, she’s theirs now. We should all go home and rest. How can I complain when it’s all so convenient and easy? That’s how it is, the dead dispatched swiftly and anonymously with a minimum of fuss and ritual. They’re history. The next day at noon is the funeral. There are two of them, someone else has also passed away. The two funerals are perfectly orchestrated, like a military parade, and the Committee has sternly admonished the women not to weep. We believe in the spirit, not the body, is the line. And finally the short procession to the cemetery, way north of the city, snow squalls blowing around the graves. It’s vast, the size of a small town, each ethnic group to its own suburb with distinct headstones. Ours, next to the Ukrainian area, are all the same compact size and austere, laid out in neat rows. The headstones are foot-square tiles laid flat on the ground, all with the same inscription, a prayer to God. No, says a member of the Committee, you cannot have your own inscription on the stone. They all have to be the same, it has been decided. Your mother’s number is 1499.

M.G. Vassanji is the author of eight novels, most recently A Delhi Obsession.

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Book of Wings

Rungh Editor — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 18:53:30 +0000

Vol. 8, No. 2 / Fiction

Book of Wings

Fiction by Tawhida Tanya Evanson

By Tawhida Tanya Evanson

Published by Esplanade Books / Véhicule Press © Tawhida Tanya Evanson. Reprinted with permission.

I died from inanimate and became animate
I died from animate and became animal
I died from animality and became human
Why should I be afraid
When have I ever become less by dying?

–Hz. Mevlana Jalálu’ddín Rúmí
mathnawí book iii 3901

Paris in the Springtime

Today I left my lover for a room with a view. He had trouble managing his time travel with me. It took only a few days for him to pack up and sail on—two wings, un oiseau. He was careful, came with intention but left no seed. We dive like birds, even into shit.

Outside the window, pigeons picked at invisible morsels on rue St-Jacques. Invasion took flight. Overcast sky that morning in the Latin Quarter. I took unsettled steps down the steep, winding, velvet staircase at l’Hotel de Médicis without ever looking back. How could I? My heart lay burst on the horizon, a red ocean hemorrhage; it was Paris in the springtime.

Did he think I would remain under such conditions? On our final night I chose to sleep on the wooden floor of our dusty room, waiting for daylight, waiting for the descent into Hell. I listened for Guan or Hausa voices to come save me, prayers of redemption, otherworldly African women to chant around my tomb. All I got were the heated moans of a woman making love in a nearby room.

My vulva pulsed. I touched myself when Shams went out that morning before the flood. I hadn’t finished by the time he returned and resented him for it. In his outstretched hands, a bouquet of roses the colour of cowardice—as if this would lift my spirits beyond our departures.

In a blunt second, Shams had aged a decade. Barely twenty-nine with wrinkles on the forehead now pronounced, a furrowed brow of doubt, the face of a guilt complex. There was no concealing a human being in supplication for falling out of love. Who knows how the heart moves, until it stops moving toward you. I did not see it coming. What do you do when the object of your love disappears in plain sight? Love lifts and is itself, a veil, said a voice from the other side of the story. This is the difference between rose-coloured and a hit of direct sun.

Shams left for a moment to use the bathroom in the hall and I finished myself off outside of him quick, deep, for the first time without him in over a year—my own unfamiliar finger between the legs.

In the end, I left the room because so little of him was still in it. The only part that mattered had disappeared. I left the roses behind because l’odeur de la mort était insupportable. Walked out into the cloudy fifth arrondissement. An early April morning, 2002. There are three versions of this story: mine, his and the Truth.

Sorrow and Ceremony

I took a sea-green leather seat in a far corner of La Contrescarpe and ordered red. The tavern was empty except for a fashionable French couple dipping toast points into duck liver pâté, quietly bored with each other. In the corner by the tall bookcases, a Black Christian monk in full white tunic and brown scapular robes sat with coffee, reading Le Monde like nothing. His cinnamon skin glowed in the orange afternoon sun, he was draped in layers, wood-rosaried at the hip, wrist, and shoulder. He suddenly burst out laughing with his whole body. All our heads gunned. He caught himself quick, returned to calm, assiduous prayer. A vow of silence, folded hands. Folded newspaper, smooth syrupy fingers, nails pink and lustrous. The shine of melanin. Our eyes met and he smiled wide. Solidarity says, “Smile, sister, this too shall pass.”

I bowed my head in his direction, put my hand to heart, but I am not comfortable. This calm is a public exterior. I am ill. I cannot hug this road alone, operate the device with any real accuracy. The tentacles aren’t connected to me. Aren’t my own.

“Monsieur! Un autre verre, j‘vous prie. Il me faut la tête chaude avant le coucher du soleil.” Sir! Another glass, please. I need my head hot before the sun sets.

When hiding in the shadows, smoke is a natural shield. I tried in vain to bring up the image of greying skin, cracked cheeks concave as they sucked on a cigarette, creases remaining long after inhalation, ashes embedded in skin. This did nothing to detract me. The old habit returned with ease and I took up smoking like an old lover.

Near the end of our affair, Shams would not even let me into his mouth. Lips closed at the nearing, legs shut, eyes on some upward vanishing point. I smashed a left shin into the corner of the bed one afternoon. It crippled me for a moment he did not react to. The scar remains to this day. Bone-deep but only a tinted scratch on the surface at the time. Airborne oil. A heavy leak. Ours were not real actions anymore, they were transactions.

The dry grape filled my head after only four sips. I sat calm in the corner, trying for a low profile. It had only been a few days since Shams had flown, though his body remained nearby. I could feel it.

I walked out of the bar after four glasses, if only to retain my public dignity. Now I’m drunk on the wine of my own making. Ha! But to uncork devotion simply through the tempered wails of the newborn, celibate, wedded to prophets. O Ancestors, where are your ceremonies? Please, I need them now.

Tawhida Tanya Evanson, Book of Wings (Esplanade Books 2021).

Tawhida Tanya Evanson is an Antiguan-Québecoise poet, performer and producer. With a 20-year practice in spoken word, she performs internationally and has released several studio albums and videopoems. She is program director of Banff Centre Spoken Word.

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Kambirinachi

Rungh Editor — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 21:59:26 +0000

Vol. 7, No. 4 / Fiction

Kambirinachi

By Francesca Ekwuyasi

Butter Honey Pig Bread
By Francesca Ekwuyasi
Arsenal Pulp Press (2020)

"Kambirinachi" is excerpted from the novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. Excerpt appears with permission from the publisher.

Kambirinachi

If you ask Kambirinachi, this is how she’ll tell it:

There was a spirit, a child, whose reluctance to be born, and subsequent boredom with life, caused her to come and go between realms as she pleased. Succumbing to the messy ordeal of being birthed, she would traverse to the flesh realm, only to carelessly, suddenly, let go of living like it was an inconvenient load. Death is only a doorway, and her dying was always a simple event; she would merely stop breathing. It was her nature. The dark tales of malevolent spirit children, Ọgbanjes, are twisted and untrue. It was never her intention to cause her mother misery; she was just restless. It was just the way.

The time before her final birth, in an attempt to make her stay, her mother marked her with a red-hot razor blade, just as the Babalawo instructed. Three deep lines at the nape of her neck, below the hairline, smeared with a pungent brown paste that burned and burned. All this so the Ọgbanje would stay bound to its body, and if not, at the very least, she would recognize it should the child choose to be born again.

The child died, of course.

She returned again. And maybe she took pity on the woman, or perhaps she was bored with the foreseeable rhythm of her existence, but this time she chose to stay. And the three horizontal welts on the back of her neck signified to the woman, her mother, that this was the same child. It might have been a coincidence; perhaps the woman’s mother-in-law (she’d never liked the woman, found her haughty) marked the child in secret to torment her.

Nevertheless, for Kambirinachi, living was a tumultuous cascade between the unbearable misery of being in this alive body indefinitely and an utter intoxication with the substance, the very matter, of life. When there was peace, life was near blissful, but otherwise, Kambirinachi’s childhood was nightmarish for her mother. Ikenna was an exhausted woman, a woman made hard by nearly two decades during which her body betrayed her. Or, as some might put it: almost two decades of being plagued by an Ọgbanje that caused her three late-term miscarriages, one stillbirth, two dead infants, and a dead toddler. She used to be much sweeter, softer, kinder, but it’s impossible to go through that particular brand of hell and stay untouched. She couldn’t help it; she hated the child a good portion of the time. And the child, too, must have hated her, after making her wait and suffer, only to wail the way she did—unprovoked, inconsolable, and seemingly interminable. To preserve her sanity and, frankly, the child’s well-being, Ikenna retreated inside herself, saving all tenderness for her husband, and leaving only a barely concealed indifference for Kambirinachi.

***

Kambirinachi was elusive. Even if she was sitting right before you, her absence would be palpable. As an eleven-year-old, her attention was always elsewhere.

“Where is Kambirinachi today?” Her father often teased, childlike, a broad smile stretched across his bearded face to reveal crooked and tobacco-stained teeth.

Kambirinachi chose that smile to be her anchor when the songs calling her back home were most persistent. One doorway back home was the unfinished borehole in the backyard, covered in flimsy, rotted wooden boards, with an opening just wide enough to swallow her small body and water just deep enough to drown her. Really, anything that would kill her was a doorway. The songs and voices of her Kin were loud loud shouting; it shocked her that nobody else could hear them. They made her accident-prone. The unfortunate thing tripped on stones that weren’t there and ended up with broken bones that couldn’t entirely be explained. She would go to sleep healthfully robust but wake up with blistering fevers. So she learned to think of her father’s smile and to sit still until the voices grew muffled and she could carry on with her adventure of the day.

Any thoughts of the future worked like a loosened tap that let the voices of her Kin rush out in a high-pressure stream, so she also learned not to think too far ahead. She thought of things she liked about being in her alive body: the smell of dust rising from the ground outside when heavy rain struck the earth, the burnt-sugar coconut taste of baba dudu. She thought of things she disliked: the sound of her mother’s voice when it was hardened by anger—she was angry often—the fervour in the pastor’s voice when he shouted on Sundays—he shouted often—about hellfire, Holy Ghost fire, and God smiting his enemies. She thought backward, about the in-between place before birth and after the hollowing of her body: her home—the place where she could become the things she loved most, where she would join the rays of sunlight and sing sing in sharp tones, high and joyful.

It struck in her a sadness, the pitying kind of sorrow, to know the things that alive bodies could never be.

There were lovely things about being alive, she had to remember, like the taste of guavas. Their existence filled her with so much joy that it burst out of her in gleeful laughter. This is how she ate them:

She found the sharpest knife in the kitchen, hiding it if her mother was near, the woman could shout, eh! She held the blade as far away from her body as her thin arms would allow—because images of her throat, tattered and bloody, flashed through her mind whenever she saw a knife (knives could also be doorways)—and sliced the bumpy emerald skin off, always trying and often failing to make a single long ribbon of the tart rind. After taking delicate bites of the soft pink flesh, shallow bites to leave the grainy seeds undisturbed, until the fruit became a knobby, slimy ball, she would pop the entire thing into her mouth, and spit out the fruit’s tiny seeds, one by one, all sucked clean.

***

Kambirinachi didn’t know about any future—how could she?

Even if she struggled past the voices, she couldn’t have imagined a future that involved leaving Abeokuta, studying fine arts at a university in Ife, meeting a person who would want to keep her, or becoming a mother, for that matter.

But before all that, how could she know, that day when she found herself in her father’s decrepit Peugeot 504 pickup, that she was being taken to boarding school in Lagos? Queen’s College in Yaba. She would be a QC girl. She couldn’t dare imagine that far.

So you’ll understand her confusion that day, dazed by the sweltering heat—for as long as they’d owned the truck, the A/C had never worked. Her mother sat in the driver’s seat in a faded adire iro and buba, talking talking.

“Kambirinachi, you have to behave o! But don’t worry, it’s a good school. It’s far, but not that far, we will visit every two weeks. Don’t cry, biko, it’s okay.”

But even as her mother said these words, her voice strained against the jagged emotions she attempted to mask by clearing her throat. Kambirinachi let tears fall freely down her face. She looked to her father leaning against the dusty truck window, his weathered face inches from hers, the smell of chewing tobacco on his breath.

“Kambi, my girl, be a big girl now, okay? Ebena akwa nwa m. Don’t cry.” He smiled despite his sadness.

“See you soon, Papa.” Her small voice shook with a question mark. “In two weeks?”

“In two weeks, my darling,” he reassured her. “If it weren’t for this rubbish car with only two seats, me sef I would be coming with you.”

Her mother started the car and a blast of heat filled the bottom of the pickup. Kambirinachi moved her legs to touch the Ghana must go shoved underneath the rusted metal of the passenger seat. Her father had filled it with tins of powdered milk, Milo, Golden Morn, and guavas—eight of them, tied tight in a black polythene bag. She watched him wave as the truck pulled out of the compound, watched him grow smaller and smaller as the distance expanded between them, waving all along. She waved back furiously, sobbing quietly.

It wasn’t until he was entirely out of sight, until she thought about seeing him again, in two weeks, the future, that the voices started their song again. At first, a single voice, high-pitched and familiar. And then another. More and more, until they were an overlapping riot of noise. Hard and harsh, relentless waves.

You won’t see him again. He will die.

She clutched her ears; they were inexplicably hot. She cried out through her tears, “No, no, please.”

“Ewo, this girl, you’ve started again. It’s okay!” her mother said.

Ikenna wanted to be firmer, but the tremor of the child’s voice softened her. She felt warm wetness slide down her plump cheeks, found that she, too, was crying. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, pretending they were only sweat.

Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer and filmmaker originally from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging.

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Polar Vortex

Rungh Editor — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 08:59:48 +0000

Vol. 7, No. 1 / Fiction

Polar Vortex

New fiction by Shani Mootoo

By Shani Mootoo

Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo
Book*hug Press, 2020

This is an excerpt from Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo, forthcoming from Book*hug Press, March 3, 2020.

a cream-coloured kurta, the neck and cuffs of the long silk shirt trimmed in gold thread. a red dhoti. a cream-and-red turban edged in gold, from which a long curtain of pearl-like beads hangs and covers his face. around him red draperies — a ceremonial canopy. behind the canopy, walls decorated in red fabric. my eyes are lowered, focused on his cream silk slipper shoes curled at the toes. he is standing on red flowers strewn on the red carpet. people hover about, their backs to us. they are busy-busy, organizing his life, but they don’t pay him, or us, attention. there is a low table inside the canopy. no, not a table, a bed. he takes my hand. we move toward the bed and lower ourselves onto it. we lie side by side, his arm across my chest. i worry people will see us like this. i want him to lie on me. i am thrusting. thrusting my body. i plead, i want him. he is holding his penis, i take hold of it, can hardly breathe, my chest aches for the release of. no, not love, sex.

everything is red. his tongue. his penis. the palms of my hands. red red red.

someone draws back the hanging cloth of the canopy, i pull away just in time and get up off the bed. drums are beaten with fury, cymbals clash, tremble, and chatter, a rhythm red and violent draws near. his soon-to-be-wife approaches, mummy-like, shrouded in flowing red and gold, marigold heads scattered ahead of her steps. i leave through a side door, looking behind me. he remains reclined, no evidence in sight of interrupted pleasure.

That dream again. In it I always want him so badly. I am shaking from my waist down, like a dog yanked off a human’s leg.

I wonder if I moved about in my sleep. If Alex has any idea of the kind of dream I had lying next to her. She’s already left the bed. And she’s closed the door — that was considerate. She is able to navigate the house soundlessly. How does she do it? Whenever I try to shut that door quietly, the hinges squeak, the handle squawks, the lock hits the jamb loudly.

I must get out of bed. It’s 7:56 a.m., much too late to put a stop to him visiting us. I have no choice now but to face him.

But he’ll be facing me, too. I’m not the only culprit here. I must remember that. Odd that I’d sleep in on this of all days.

But not so odd, I suppose, that I’d have dreamt of him. But this, of all dreams.

It’s so quiet with the door closed. Funny, you can’t hear a thing from the rest of the house, but you can hear a dog out on the street barking and, from outside the window behind the bed, a bird — at least, I think it’s a bird — scurrying along the metal eavestrough. Could be a squirrel. A chipmunk maybe. Or a mouse trying to get in from the cold. We’re supposed to be fine with that, supposed to expect that sort of thing living in an old farmhouse on what is technically an island. I doubt I’ll ever get used to critters wanting to share space with me.

The desire I felt in the dream lingers in my body. Ripples of pleasure torture me. I’ll think of Alex. I’ll curl under the covers here for just a few minutes more and imagine her.

But a feeling of regret descends on me, and I take my hands from beneath the covers and pull the top sheet taut up to my chin. I wonder what she’s doing. We hadn’t ended the night well. Yes, that’s right. There’d been all that tension. I wonder how she is this morning.

We’d come to bed, both of us, with heavy hearts. The silence between us crouched on my chest like a small animal breathing in my face. After a while, my e-book held like a wall, I wondered if I should turn and hug her, perhaps say something kind. Instead, I closed the book, and she, closing hers, too, reached up and turned off her bedside lamp. When I heard her gentle sleep-breathing, I relaxed. But for a good while I couldn’t sleep. Then, just as I was finally drifting off, her perfectly aware voice ripped apart the veil.

“Was there ever anything between you? Is there anything you should tell me?”

I jolted wide awake. If playful jealousies had been part of our little games of arousal, it was too late — in the night, and in the trajectory that has led us to today — to expect this as a motive for her question. Should I answer with a clearly irritated voice, I wondered, or should I respond kindly? Should I take on a tone of indignation and ask what might she possibly be insinuating by “anything” and by “between”?

“Are you awake?” she persisted.

The pull toward sleep had disarmed me. I was too tired to properly gear myself up for a discussion that could easily deteriorate into argument. “I am now,” I said, biding my time. I stared tensely into the blackened room. Another tactic was necessary. “The only thing you need to know about Prakash,” I capitulated, my voice low to emphasize I’d been well on my way to sleep, “is that he’s loyal. Very loyal. He doesn’t drop his friends easily.”

She did not respond. This woke me further, and I felt pressured to continue. I added that while I wasn’t surprised he’d gotten in touch, I also wasn’t worried it meant the beginning of anything — for instance, a connection we’d be obliged to carry on. Again she didn’t respond. Fully awake, deciding on kindness, I softened and offered more: that was Prakash, I said — here today, gone tomorrow. Still nothing from her. If she’d picked up on my feeble attempt and the careless contradictions in it to reassure her, she didn’t let on. I knew she hadn’t just suddenly fallen asleep. She wanted me to speak. So even as I felt worn out so late at night, and was struggling for the right words, I acquiesced and added gently, “You’ve been so — suspicious is not the word, nor skeptical, but so — so something regarding him, Alex. As if it’s unthinkable that I could have an old friend who’d want to visit me. Am I that unlovable?”

From her came finally a response, and it was one that relaxed me, a soft and breathy cluster of a chortle. I turned on my side and put my arm across her. She drew it tighter, as if it were a seat belt, and grasped my hand. We lay like that for some minutes, and at last, feeling relieved, I closed my eyes. Then, just as I felt again the tug of sleep, her voice, as alert as if we were in the midst of a daytime chat, startled me: “You know, five years ago, when we came here to live, we left so much behind.”

What was she getting at, I wondered. I was tempted to beg, Do you seriously want, at this time of the night, to talk about our move here? But gratitude for what I imagined was a switch from our previous contentious topic held me back. I gave her hand a light squeeze by way of acknowledging I’d heard her.

“I mean, we’re not the same people anymore,” she continued.

“Aren’t you tired, Alex?” I asked.

“I’m just thinking that one can’t really hold on to the past. Not if you want to move forward. We all eventually relieve ourselves of things and people no longer in our lives.”

I pulled my hand from hers. Despite the heat beginning to flush my face, I made sure to keep my voice even, and asked, “So what are you saying?”

“Well, just that if we’re not in touch with someone for several years, perhaps it’s not a friendship worth holding on to, even if it had once been. I mean, you’ll find out, won’t you? But perhaps these things just take time, and letting go happens naturally. On its own.”

I had to bite my lip to prevent my baser self from flaring up and announcing that Prakash was not simply any old friend, and that the history he and I shared — his part in it, my part in it — was more than reason enough for him to want to pay me a visit. But this was approaching truths and subjects I couldn’t afford to unbridle.

That’s why I overslept — I’d been awake most of the night stewing about Alex’s assumptions and worries, and my own foolishness. Oh, man. If only I could step back in time, I’d undo this mess. Why on earth did I invite him here? Into my home. My sanctuary. Our home, Alex’s and mine. But one can also ask: why did he, in the first place, contact me? It should have been clear, at least this time, that I’d meant to cut ties with him. I guess that’s what happens when you simply hope people intuit what you’re intending. But I couldn’t have told him directly, explicitly, to bugger off and leave me alone. Of course I couldn’t.

Alex has been testy ever since she learned of his visit. She knows nothing of my connection to Prakash, really, so why this fractiousness? Her discontent about his coming here has been less than playful. It amounts to insinuations, if not accusations, of a dalliance — past or present, who knows what’s in her mind? — and, whether or not she’s aware of it, casts aspersions on my sexuality.

It’s all really unfortunate, and her manner makes me feel guilty. Doubly guilty, in fact. For asking him here, to the home I share with her, and for cutting him out of my life.

Alex’s unease, given what she knows — and does not know — is unusual and extreme. I ask if something else is bothering her, but it’s always that uninviting two-word answer she delivers: “The book.” Or: “My work.” One and the same, really. Or she just stares at me blankly, unnervingly.

And when Prakash gets here, what will I say to him about why I so obviously tried to snip him out of the picture?

If he is to arrive right at noon, then he’s probably just getting in his car for the three-hour drive, if you count rest stops on the highway and all, before he even crosses the bridge onto the island. He doesn’t drink coffee. We have black tea in a tin somewhere. It’s old, but he didn’t used to be fussy. I wonder what he’s like today.

Alex has an unfathomable memory for even the most inconsequential of details. What was it she asked when I told her my friend Prakash had gotten in touch? The Ugandan guy you met in university? Something like that. I’d mentioned him briefly, one time, and that was a couple days after she and I first met. One time, that was all, six years ago, and yet she remembered.

We were sitting on the couch, with Elliot, good dog that he was, possessively and conveniently sprawled across a good half of the seat, and Alex and I were obliged to sit against each other at one end. A throw pillow was wedged between her and me. I remember my mind fixed on the small pillow, and how the act of removing it seemed too much of an announcement. We’ve joked about that since. It turns out that she, too, was focused on removing it but sensed my hesitation and didn’t want to “scare” me off.

We were flipping through a photo album she’d pulled off one of my bookshelves. I had one arm on the back of the couch behind her, my body angled toward her, Elliot pressed against me and snoring. I can still feel on the tips of my fingers the slight contact they made with the fine stray wool fibers of her sweater. We came to a group photo of my university table-tennis league teams, about twelve of us. Fiona, my “roommate” at the time (we didn’t know others like us; hard to imagine nowadays, but it was true back then), and I were pressed against each other. She and I had relished the idea that, despite facing a camera, the private heat and intensity between us would be known only to us, yet immortalized for all time. This was our secret. Our friend Prakash stood on the other side of me, smiling broadly, giving the photographer his trademark V sign, his two fingers curled just enough to assure that his peace was benign, not militant.

“You look so young. You look like a young boy. How old were you?” Alex asked. This pleased me. The photo was taken in our fourth and final year, I told her. I was twenty-two or so. Alex didn’t pay Prakash any attention, but she honed right in on Fiona. “The woman next to you. Who is she?” she asked, her forefinger tracing the seam that joined Fiona and me. I was impressed and, at the same time, made shy by the obvious perceptiveness in the question. There was expectation in her tone. I laughed guiltily and, nevertheless, asked why she was asking. She said I was between two people, a man and a woman, and the woman and I seemed to be leaning into each other. Of course, once she said this, I, too, saw how obvious, how intentional-seeming, such closeness was, and I saw for the first time the looks on our faces. I became in that instant a stranger looking at a found photograph and saw the half-smile and deviousness, a kind of fear and daring at once. And I saw how naive we were, how reckless, in posing so intimately, but more importantly I thought Alex was disarmingly perceptive.

And, Alex continued, it would not have occurred to her that I would have been involved with the man.

Alex and I hadn’t yet slept together, but the air in my little living room had become so electric I knew I wasn’t the only one with it on the brain. I found myself telling Alex that Fiona and I had met in a first-year class and decided to rent an apartment together, that within days of doing so we became lovers, my first time, her first and only — at least at that time — with a woman. We remained lovers throughout our university years, I said, the wistfulness in my voice hopefully pointing to the unforgotten sensations of first-time love.

“First time?” asked Alex.

“Every time,” I remember responding, grinning.

She twisted her lips and smiled at the same time, and said, “Come on. You must have been in your late teens, early twenties? Was she the first person?”

I was too shy to simply tell her yes, Fiona was indeed the first. I quickly explained that when I was growing up on my little island in the Caribbean, women from families like mine remained girls in their family’s care until they were married, regardless of their age. You were so sheltered, so watched in my kind of family — an Indian family — that unless you were wayward or just stupidly brave, you didn’t get to flirt or experience sexual intimacy with another person until you were married, or, if it was in the cards for you, you left home and went to another country where, in the case of people from families like mine, you attended university — which allowed you more freedom than you’d ever imagined possible. And what do you do with freedom like that? You learn to kiss and you learn to fuck. You learn what’s possible, you experiment, and you figure out in the dorms or in your little bachelor apartment off campus what you like to do and to whom, and what you like to have done to you, and by whom, who you are in bed, who you can and can’t be. All of that, a vital part of your university education abroad. I laughed coyly when I said this. She didn’t think it funny. She nodded soberly. When you went back home, I continued, you went back a different person, with more than one degree under your belt. Still, she wasn’t amused. If you weren’t so stupid as to marry while you were away, despite the paper degree you had to show off when you returned home, they’d still call you a girl, and you wouldn’t be considered a woman until you married — but what a girl you’d become! She smiled.

So, yes, first time, first person. And it was magic — frighteningly magical, I repeated in a quiet, pensive voice. Alex had angled her body slightly to face me. “You?” I asked.

“Elementary school, in Montreal.” The throw pillow was definitely an intrusion. “There was a girl, from a very rich and powerful family. She instructed us to touch her and each other. I think about that now,” Alex told me, “and I have to wonder how she knew.”

I feigned a nervous chuckle and said, “But you don’t really count that, do you?”

“So the real first time, then,” she answered, “was when I was fifteen. A boy, my age, from my high school. We did it on a couch in the basement of his parents’ home.”

There we were on a couch, and I stopped myself from the tempting crudeness of drawing a parallel. Alex examined the photograph more carefully, and I imagined she was trying to picture Fiona and me, our mouths pressed together, tongues touching, the heat of our bodies against one another. As I was whipping up something between Alex and me, I was aware that we were being stared at by a broadly grinning Prakash waving his weak V-shaped fingers. I decided not to mention anything about him, but elaborated that it was with Fiona I’d experienced that first-time sensation of ascending, ascending, and ascending yet further, and then, that sudden dive-bombing feeling, your body shattering into a trillion shards of twinkling, long-dying light.

In a whisper, Alex asked if I’d remained friends with Fiona, or with any of the other team members, and although I didn’t want to get into a conversation about Prakash, I said, “Him,” landing my forefinger on his face, and, for some reason, unable to leave it at that, as if it were the most important thing about him, I answered that he was our friend, a refugee from Idi Amin’s Uganda.

“You’re still friends? What’s his name?” she asked.

“Sort of. Prakash,” I said, and she left it there.

I didn’t tell her that in the last months of our university years, Fiona had begun to have an affair. With a man. A student named Stan. Had I embarked on this story, I might have told her then that it was the man in the photo who’d helped me through that wretched period and many others, but I did not want to derail the moment with tales of woe and disappointments.

Shani Mootoo writes fiction and poetry, and is a visual artist and video maker. She is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Arts Award, 2017 Chalmers Fellowship Award, and the James Duggins Outstanding Midcareer Novelist Award. Her forthcoming novel Polar Vortex will be published early 2020 by Book*Hug Press.

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The Youth of God

Rungh Editor — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 19:21:36 +0000

Vol. 6, No. 3 / Fiction

The Youth of God

By Hassan Ghedi Santur

The Youth of God
By Hassan Ghedi Santur
Mawenzi House Publishers 2019
Excerpt – Chapter 2

"Bismilahi rahmani rahiim." Nuur mouthed these words as he washed his right foot in the sink of the boys' washroom. He had fifteen minutes to perform his ablution, pray, and get to Mr Ilmi's biology class.

As he washed his foot, he caught a glimpse of himself in the smudgy mirror above the sink. The lanky frame, the dark complexion and narrow, pointy nose separating his high cheekbones—his features, he thought, lacked the grace and charm that drew everyone, especially girls, to his older brother Ayuub. But Nuur had made peace with his appearance, for he recognized that there was more to him than what appeared to the naked eye. He carried a secret world inside him that no mirror in the world could ever reflect.

He heard voices outside. Quickly he finished washing, and just as he was jamming a bare foot into his black sneakers, the door swung open.

James Calhoun entered, followed by his entourage of two, both overweight and overdressed for early October, in baggy jeans and hoodies. They had a habit of walking several feet behind James, who liked to stroll the hallways of the school with the swagger of a tin-pot dictator.

James had a big, bald head like that of a cross between a baby's and a pit bull's. "You better not be doing what I think you're doing," he said, as he made towards Nuur with his usual stylized and menacing limp.

"I'm not doing anything," Nuur said in a quivering voice.

"Don't lie to me, bitch," James snarled, his breath smelling of nachos and cigarettes.

"I'm not lying."

James turned to his sidekicks, both grinning with anticipation, ready to do whatever was required.

"You were washing your stinking feet in the sink, the same sink we use to wash our hands and faces. That's fucking disgusting," James said, his voice louder with each word. "What do you think we should do about this, boys" he asked, without turning to look at his posse.

"I was just making wadu, to get ready for prayer," Nuur whispered, hoping to elicit from them some respect for God, or failing that, compassion for his devotion to God.

"Making what?" James seethed.

"A wadu."

"The fuck is that?"

His two friends sniggered.

Nuur felt a panic rise up from deep within his guts, telling him to fight or flee. Fighting was out of the question. That would be like slapping a pit bull in the face. As soon as he tried to move, he felt his slender bones, for he had no muscles to speak of, crash into the large, surprisingly soft body of James. Nuur struggled to maneuver his way between James and the other two boys.

"Where the fuck you think you're going, bitch?" James said. With his warm sweaty hands, he grabbed Nuur by the back of his neck and shoved him towards the middle of the three stalls of the washroom. Nuur stumbled onto the linoleum floor, his head an inch away from the hard marble of the white toilet bowl. His kufi, the small white cap he always wore, fell into the toilet with its several large, brown residues left by the last flush.

"He looks thirsty, boys. You think we should offer him a cold, refreshing drink of water?" The two sidekicks outside the stall chuckled approvingly.

Nuur felt James grab a fistful of the collar of his qamiis, the long brown robe under which he wore a white t-shirt and pair of khakis. It was an ensemble that made him look like a darker, smaller version The Youth of God 5 of Osama bin Laden and the butt of jokes in the school's hallways. He was used to kids calling him Osama or Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda Boy in class and in the hallways and most especially on the rare occasions when he was brave enough to venture into the wild, wild West that was the school cafeteria. He had resigned himself to the endless taunting and name-calling that came his way for wearing a qamiis to school; for growing a big, bushy beard at eighteen; and for wearing a little white head cap that gave him an air of piety and screamed weakness when all the other boys at the school looked like extras on the set of a Kanye West music video.

Nuur knew that no amount of begging or appeal to the better selves of the three bullies would save him from getting his head dunked in the filthy water. He also knew that a speck of toilet water would be enough to nullify the absolute state of cleanliness that his prayer required.

It was a swift, unpremeditated move. As soon as he caught a glimpse of the space between the floor and the metal divider between the stalls, Nuur shrugged off James's clasp, dived onto the cold, dusty floor, slid into the adjoining stall and locked the door. James and his minions pushed and pounded with ferocious anger. Nuur stood up on the rim of the toilet bowl, lest they grab his legs and drag him out.

Any one of them could have mustered enough force to break the door down and retrieve Nuur from his hiding place, but apparently it seemed to require too much effort for the meagre entertainment value of roughing him up. Nuur thanked Allah for their lack of resolve.

"I'll get you, bitch," James muttered.

"Yeah, bitch," another boy echoed.

"Better fucking believe it," boy two chimed in.

Nuur heard them shuffle off one by one. He waited a few moments until he was sure they had left, then stepped down from the toilet bowl and lingered in the stall for a moment to recite the Fatiha in his head and offer his gratitude to God. He made sure not to let any of the Quran escape his lips, the boy's washroom on the second floor of Thistletown Collegiate Institute was too profane a place for the holy words to be spoken out loud.

He came out of the stall and looked around. All was quiet. Confident that the three bullies were gone, he opened the door of the adjacent stall and stared at his lovely, white kufi sitting in the smudgy bottom of the toilet. There was no hope of rescuing it. But come payday next week, he would go to the Somali flea market on Rexdale and Martingrove and buy himself a nice new kufi.

Suddenly he felt better. The prospect of buying another, better kufi gave him just enough strength to go to his afternoon biology class even if it meant being in the same room as those thugs. Biology was his favourite subject. He wasn't going to surrender it to those boys the way he did his head cap. The possibility of learning something new fortified Nuur and lifted his otherwise dim spirits.

Hassan Ghedi Santur emigrated from Somalia to Canada at age thirteen. He has worked as a radio journalist for CBC radio and his print journalism work has appeared in the New York Times, Yahoo News, and The Walrus, among others.

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Picking Trilliums

Rungh Editor — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 05:38:27 +0000

Vol. 6, No. 2 / Fiction

Picking Trilliums

By Derek Mascarenhas

This is an excerpt from Coconut Dreams by Derek Mascarenhas, forthcoming from Book*hug Press, April 15, 2019.

Only when we're the last ones left on the bus ride home does Aiden talk to me. Between bumps that send us bouncing slightly in our seats he turns to me and asks, "Why were you late today, Ally?"

"Tommy Groh wanted to see my feet," I say.

"And why did that make you late?" Aiden takes an orange, leftover from lunch, out of his bag. He bites it with his bottom teeth to break the skin and starts peeling it.

"Ms. Bisset made me dust the chalk brushes before I left," I tell him, and hold my hands up as proof. They're dried white by the chalk, like I've switched hands with an old person. I rest them at my sides so I don't get chalk on my skirt.

"But why did your teacher keep you?" Aiden peels the orange skin off in a spiral, like a pig's tail. He always tries to take the whole thing off in one go.

"Tommy wouldn't stop bothering me, so I kicked him in the stomach." I think my brother will be happy that I've stuck up for myself, but he stops peeling the orange and shakes his head.

"Ally, you're not going to make any new friends if you go around kicking people."

"But it's not my fault! That meanie kept asking me if my toes were brown, too. And I don't want to be Tommy's friend, anyway."

It isn't fair—I used to have a best friend named Sara in my class. She had a grey cat named Smoke, and she liked dill pickle chips, too. But she moved away when her dad got a new job in Peterborough. I still don't know where that is. Everyone says it isn't far, but I haven't seen her since.

A few weeks later we got Tommy Groh in our class.

"Tommy's probably only curious," says Aiden. "Next time tell him your feet are the same colour as the rest of you." Aiden removes the whole orange peel, forms it into its original shape, and puts it back in his lunch bag. He splits the orange in two and offers me half.

I shake my head, then pick at a piece of dark green sticky tape that covers a hole in the back of the seat ahead of us. "You said you'd protect me."

"I will," Aiden says quickly, with orange slices in his mouth. He swallows and adds, "I'll talk to Tommy tomorrow."

"Tomorrow's our field trip."

"Then the day after."

I nod my head, feeling better. "Did anyone ever ask to see your feet when you were in Grade 2?" I ask.

"Worse. The boys asked what colour my you-know-what was." He points at his crotch. "And the girls, the girls wanted to feel my soft brown ears." Aiden smiles his slow smile, like honey being poured. It's impossible not to smile with him. "And don't worry, Ally-cat, I won't tell Mom. We'll just rinse your hands with the garden hose before we go inside."

I forgot about Mom. I'd be in big trouble at home if I got in small trouble at school. She always puts our education first. It's a good thing she won't find out tonight, or she might not let me go on my field trip tomorrow. I'll tell her after that. I think she'll be on my side, anyway—she was last time something like this happened. It was during Black History Month when we learned about Rosa Parks not sitting at the back of the bus. I found it strange how she wanted to sit at the front; everyone I know fights for a spot at the back of the bus.

I asked Ms. Bisset, "Where would I sit on the bus back then?"

"I don't know," she snapped. "It's not an appropriate question."

When I told Mom, she said it was a perfectly fine question, and she agreed with me that I'd probably sit somewhere in the middle, like I do now.

The Royal Botanical Gardens are only a short bus ride from our school, but so different from the concrete schoolyard. Everywhere giant trees and plants are coming to life. Our class spends most of the morning inside the greenhouses—the air is wet and there are shiny-leafed plants from all around the world, some with flowers as bright and colourful as saris.

Then it's lunch. I avoid sitting near Tommy because of what happened yesterday, and because Mom packed me a brown paper bag with a juice box and two chapatis with peanut butter. "East meets West," she said. Almost everyone else has white-bread sandwiches. Chapatis are tastier, but sometimes I wish I had the same lunch so I wouldn't have to explain what I was eating. Natalie Dibben is the one who asks me about it today. She's my buddy for the trip, and her mom brought her a special lunch, too. Natalie always tells people she's different because she has diabetes, and she shows everyone her lunch instead of keeping it hidden like me.

After lunch we are led on a nature walk through the forest trails. I've worn my pink rubber boots because Mom said it might rain. Our guide points out things along the way as she leads the group; she's wearing a dark green windbreaker and has three earrings in each ear. My teacher, Ms. Bisset, is at the back of the line chatting with Mrs. Dibben, who's a nurse and works night shifts, so she can usually come on our trips to help supervise. I wish my mom could get time off work one day to come, too.

The plump, grey clouds above look ready to burst, but the sun peeks out every once in a while. I hear birds chirping in the trees but can't spot any because Natalie keeps distracting me.

"Do you like my medic alert?" she holds up her arm, showing the bracelet off like it's diamond jewellery.

"It's nice," I say.

"How many needles have you had?"

I shrug.

"I've taken so many needles, they don't even hurt anymore."

Needles are scary. I could never imagine them not hurting. When I think of them, a circus starts in my stomach.

We stop walking, surrounded by tall trees that show only small pieces of sky. Our guide pulls a big bag of birdseed from her knapsack. She carefully pours little piles of seed into our hands, one by one. Everyone crowds around her and wants to be the first to get theirs, including Tommy. I wait until he's moved on to get my seeds.

"Spread out into a circle," our guide says. "Hold your hands very still and they will come and get it."

Small birds appear from the forest like magic. They come closer, down to lower branches, then right into the hands of my classmates. Some of the students laugh out loud, a few scream and drop the seed on the ground, and others stare silently. But no birds land in my hands. I'm in the same circle and I hold my hands as still as I can, but none come.

Ms. Bisset begins to gather students to continue along the trail. I tell her I haven't fed any birds yet. She gives me a look.

"I can stay behind with Ally until she gets one." It's Mrs. Dibben, Natalie's mom.

"Oh, you don't have to do that," Ms. Bisset says.

"It's no problem. I'd be glad to."

"Alright, then. Ally, what do you say to Mrs. Dibben?"

"Thank you," I say. I could have hugged Mrs. Dibben. I like her much better than Natalie.

Tommy approaches Ms. Bisset and says, "I didn't get any birds either."

I don't blame the birds for not wanting to land in Tommy's hands—he'd probably try and catch them. I can't understand why the birds wouldn't come into my hands, though. Maybe they can still smell the chalk from yesterday. But I washed my hands well. Plus I'm not even sure birds can smell.

"Okay. You can stay behind as well," says Ms. Bisset. "We'll have to switch partners. Tommy, you're now with Ally, and Natalie, you go with Ryan."

The rest of my class follows the guide down the trail while Tommy and I wait to see if we'll have more luck with the birds. Mrs. Dibben tells us to stretch out our arms as far away from us as we can and be very quiet. My hands are cupped tight to try and hold them still. I worry the birds are no longer hungry. But then one lands on the tips of my fingers. It's small with brown feathers on its back and lighter ones on its tummy. The bird has a short beak and black eyes that stare at me for just a second, as if asking first. Its feet prick my fingers, but they are too light to hurt. The bird dives in to eat the seed, but soon pops back up to stop and look around, its head moving from side to side. It looks delicate. My dad sometimes says I eat like a bird. He says I get distracted easily and sit with half a bum on my chair, ready to run if the doorbell or phone rings.

One more nibble and the bird takes off into the trees. I brush my hands together and let the few remaining seeds fall to the ground. Then I put my hands back in the pockets of my sweater and look over at Tommy. He's standing very still with his hands cupped together. He has two birds nibbling at the seed and isn't trying to kill them. Mrs. Dibben gives me a wink—but I've spotted something: trilliums.

They sit next to the path waiting to be noticed, like they've chosen a bad spot in hide-and-go-seek. Once you see them, you can't miss them, bright white on the forest floor and appearing secretly, like the birds.

"Oh, I love trilliums," says Mrs. Dibben. "A sure sign of spring. Do you kids know it's against the law to pick them?"

"Really?" says Tommy.

"Really," says Mrs. Dibben. "Picking the flower does awful damage to the plant. It can take a long time before it regrows, if it does at all. The only time it's acceptable is if you're going to transplant them. I tried it once. I put one in my front yard, but it just wouldn't take. They don't like the direct sunlight. I guess that's why you have to come out here and see them."

"Mrs. Dibben?" I say.

"Yes, sweetie."

"My mom told me that trilliums are angels. God sends them down to see the world first from the ground up. And they can only get their wings after they've been trilliums. But if they get picked, they can't make it back up to heaven."

"Little angels," says Mrs. Dibben. "Ally, tell your mother that's a lovely story."

Before I can answer, Ms. Bisset comes running down the path, screaming.

"Mrs. Dibben!" Her face is red. "Natalie's had an attack! She's passed out farther up the trail."

I see Mrs. Dibben's face change as she shifts gears like she must at the hospital when a patient comes in. "I'm on my way," she says.

"Ally, Tommy—stay right here on the trail," Ms. Bisset tells us. "I'm going to run and call 911."

The two women run off in opposite directions down the trail. I want to go with Mrs. Dibben. Adults always think they can run faster than kids, but I can run like the wind. Last summer I knocked out one of my baby teeth when I tripped over a groundhog hole running my fastest. Our doctor said I ran so fast, the ground couldn't keep up. I wonder if they'll take Natalie to the hospital. Maybe if she hadn't talked so much about her diabetes it wouldn't have happened. That's wrong. I hope she'll be okay.

I can't see my teacher or Mrs. Dibben anymore and I notice how quiet the forest has become. I turn to Tommy. He's stepped off the trail and is creeping toward the flowers. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing." He crouches down beside one of the trilliums and puts his hands around it.

"Stop it!" I yell.

"Make me."

I follow Tommy into the forest. But I'm too late: he plucks the trillium flower from its leaves. I can't believe what I've just seen. I want to cry.

"Here you go." Tommy holds the flower out for me, like I'm supposed to take it.

I'm confused why he's giving it to me, and still upset. "I don't want it."

"I thought girls liked flowers."

"I like them in the ground."

Tommy just tosses the flower to the forest floor.

"I'm going to tell." As soon as I say this, he pushes me to the ground. I don't see it coming and land on my elbows and bum.

"That's for kicking me yesterday," he says.

The damp leaves are soaking into me, but I just lie there. Tommy grabs one of my pink rubber boots and pulls. He wrestles it off my foot and throws it behind him, then yanks my sock off and does the same with it. He stares for a few seconds, like he's looking at a bug.

"Ewww. Your toes are brown! Freak." Tommy turns and runs off after Mrs. Dibben.

I get up. I have to hop on one foot to get my boot and put it back on. I brush some mud and leaves off my sweater, and find my sock, but put it in my pocket. On the ground where I found it, I see the white petals.

When Aiden and I are alone again on the bus ride home, he asks, "How was your field trip?"

I tell him it was fine and tug at the same piece of sticky green tape covering up the hole in the seat in front of us. The day's events swirl in my head. When I got back with my class, everyone was talking about how Natalie had been lying still on the ground and how the ambulance came and took her and her mom away.

It starts to rain. Droplets race down the windows of the bus.

"Is that Tommy kid still bugging you?" Aiden asks.

"No," I say, but I don't look him in the eyes.

Mom is always telling us how being different is a blessing, and how we'll understand when we're older. Right now, I don't believe her. Different means you're different.

The rain comes down hard and crashes against the glass panes and metal roof. I can't see outside anymore. At first it feels like we're in a car wash, but then it's like we're trapped in a long, dark room. It feels weird having one bare foot in my boot, too. Inside my sweater pocket I squeeze my crumpled-up sock. I don't know why I didn't put it back on.

I close my eyes and think of trilliums, but can only see the one that Tommy picked, just leaves and no petals. I wonder how long it will take to flower again, or if it ever will.

Derek Mascarenhas' fiction has been published in Joyland, The Dalhousie Review, Switchback, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Antigonish Review.

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The Tiger Flu

Rungh Editor — Sat, 24 Nov 2018 06:36:41 +0000

Vol. 6, No. 1 / Fiction

The Tiger Flu

An excerpted chapter, The Starfish Groom, from Larissa Lai’s new novel.

By Larissa Lai

Arsenal Pulp Press (2018)
Excerpt from The Tiger Flu
Reproduced with permission from the publisher.
All rights reserved.

Kirilow Groundsel

Grist Village (Fourth Quarantine Ring)

* * *

Node: Kernels Plump

Day: 1

Even if she is our last doubler, I don't want Auntie Radix to have Peristrophe Halliana's eyes. Auntie Radix already took Peristrophe Halliana's liver a week ago, and one of her kidneys four weeks before that. Auntie Radix says that it is the duty and nature of a starfish to give. I tell her it is the duty and nature of a doubler to know when to stop asking. Peristrophe Halliana and I have seen the new monsoons only nineteen times each. We are barely old enough to do what we do. Auntie Radix has been drenched by the rains forty-eight times. It should be her job to sacrifice for us, not the other way round. It's a good thing that memory is not a part of the body that can be cut out, or no doubt she would ask for Peristrophe Halliana's memory too.

I bite back my resentment. Radix Bupleuri is our queen, not to mention the eldest of the eighty-three sisters who live at Grist Village and a direct descendent of Grandma Chan Ling. She is well past a healthy age for child-bearing, but she is also our last doubler. With our death rates, we Grist sisters go the way of the dodo, unless she keeps birthing puppies. Yes, from her midnight egg space and—pop!—out her hoo, once plump and fresh, now floppy as an old sock. Still juicy to her young groom, who loves her. For me, nothing about her is juicy. Everything is duty. That means grit and grin, through every whim and tantrum.

I sigh. I clean then sharpen my knives on my precious whetstone. Don't you know that diamonds are a girl's best friend? We made the whetstone ourselves, crushed so many engagement rings from skeletons of the time before, six glass towers full of nice ladies, sweet so sweet. Purty, the scavenger Aunties tell me, purty as cover girl, wonderful wonder bra, guess? by george marciano.

Purty and thin as skin and bones. They had time to work off the weight. Time to rot, time to mummify. For every season there is a reason. Off their skinny dead fingers the scavenger Aunties took their diamonds. Crushed those doggies to a coarse salt and made me my whetstone. Now I smooth my blade, one, two, three. All that love from the time before rushes into my shiv.

That's the way the cookie crumbles, I tell my beloved Peristrophe Halliana, as I work my knives. Once they are good and sharp, I wipe them down with mother moonshine. We make it ourselves in clawfoot tubs from the time before. With potatoes cropped from our own fields, you know, Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? We pretty maids, we Sisters Grist, some call us tub puppets, fuck moppets, matchstick monkeys. Who cares? We will outlive them all, in beds of our own making.

Peristrophe Halliana sips six slugs of mother moonshine infused with forget-me-do. I wipe down the last blade with a seventh. Then the flame, hot so hot. My precious Bunsen burner salvaged from the very lab where Grandma Chan Ling was made, in old Saltwater Town, the ruin that somehow keeps on being a city. All railway tracks, mouldy stucco, and tarnished glass skyscrapers. All rain, mud, bedbugs, and rodentia. Rock-a-bye baby, in the cradle of civilization. Not that I've ever been there, but my mother double teaches me all the songs and all the history she remembers.

Thinking about the filth of Saltwater City makes me will my knives super clean. Pour more vodka in to burn baby learn. I'm being followed by a moonshine shadow. Peristrophe Halliana is prone to infection. The cutting might be no big deal, but healing's a bitch. So knives must shimmer clean, a lean mean clean. I mean, sparkle, twinkle like the lemon muscle man from the time before. Clean as mister. Even though the mistresses are master here.

The first cut is the sleekest. At the corner of the eye, at the zygomatic process, where the top of the skull attaches to the side of the head. I know my bones. My mother double taught me well. Foot bone connected to the heel bone. Heel bone connected to the ankle bone. Peristrophe Halliana sighs a sleepy sigh of pleasure-pain. I move my fingers beneath her eyeball, the tiniest blade concealed between middle and index. Nudge it out and softly slice the root. She groans. I tug at the globe, and it releases with a gentle squelch and click.

"Those are pearls that were her eyes," I sing as blood gushes from her left socket. I cinch it shut, and suture with my finest lichen fibre thread. From her right eye, she gazes at me with love.

I give her another couple of slugs of mother moonshine. Then, careful so careful, I work my blade on the right. Again, the root. Another squelch, another click. How can Peristrophe have so much blood in her head? I staunch the flow with mushroom gauze, press into the wound until the hot pulse of blood subsides. I stitch her up quick.

As I prepare my knives, I rant the chant the grannies gave me, the one that Grandma Chan Ling heard from the dirt, so long ago. My mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, smoking medicinal marijuana in the old rosewood pipe she inherited from Grandma Chan Ling herself, chants with me to make sure I get the words right. She teaches me my genealogy. You know, like, where we came from. What we're here for. "You must hold these things, Kirilow," she tells me. "We hold all that remains of the old world's knowledge in our raw brains. That means we need to be extra smart."

She teaches me how to be a good groom to my beloved Peristrophe Halliana, the last starfish among us, the last giver. It isn't easy, you know—to have and to hold, to kiss and to cut. Slit sluts, that's what they call us in Saltwater City. I'm not ignorant, I know what they say. It's why they expelled our grannies eighty years ago. For having and holding. For slicing and stitching. What did they expect from us anyhow? That they could keep making us again and again and again and again? Bust us from their greasy bottles like so many cheap gene genies? As if.

Grandma Chan Ling invented the partho pop, you know, how we egg ourselves along—I mean, the long, lizardy love of the Grist sisters. We split, we slit, we heal, we groom, self-mutated beyond the know-how of the clone company Jemini that spawned us, and the HöST scale and microchip factories that bought our grannies to work for them. But there are flaws in our limited DNA—the DNA of just one woman. We mutate for better and worse, for sickness and health. But more for sickness and worse. Only our starfish can save us, by regrowing whatever grooms like me cut out of them. Grandma Chan Ling invented the kiss cut, the repair job—what do you say? The fix, the patch. The first starfish gave her liver, her kidneys, and, at last, her red-hot heart to the first doubler. And so it was, in the beginning.

I chant loud as I can to push down the dread that roils in my belly:

###

Our mother of milk and mildew

Our mother of dirt

Our mother of songs and sighing

Our mother of elk

Blessed are the sheep

And blessed are the roses

Blessed are the tigers

Wind, bones, and onion flowers

We remember you and we remember rain

We remember mushrooms holding the globe in their mycorrhizal net

We remember dust

We remember meat

We remember fibre in its weave and fibre in its weft

The shifting and wobbling of the intentional earth

###

After we escaped the sister factories of Saltwater City, Grandma Chan Ling herself doctored it all. Our great progenitress—not only the first doubler but also the first groom, inventor of the loving transplant, the sexy suture. It feels good, you know, don't doubt it. We mutated the first forget-me-do, not that Isabelle Chow, not those Saltwater killers who claim it for who knows what new wickedness. Forget-me-do makes you feel pain as pleasure. It takes away all memory and feeling of pain, leaves nothing but a craving to be cut again. We cultivated it for the sisterly insertion and the doublers return, two holy ways for one to become two.

Larissa Lai is a writer, poet, and educator.

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All of Us in Our Own Lives. New Fiction by Manjushree Thapa

Rungh Editor — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 02:54:34 +0000

Vol. 5, No. 4 / Fiction

All of Us in Our Own Lives

By Manjushree Thapa

IF AVA COULD get back those ten lost days, she would swim to the whale rock at every chance, sunbathe on its surface and then plunge into the cool, sparkling water, losing herself in the depths, in the darkness, and staying underwater forever before coming up for a breath. Then she would plunge back down again. She wouldn't waste any time at the cottage talking – or trying to talk – with Gavin. She wouldn't miss a single chance to swim in the lake if she could get those ten days back.

She picked up a folder from her desk, put it down, and picked it up again. In front of her lay a hundred and seventy-one folders, stacked all the way from her attaché case to the crystal pyramid that she had received as a deal toy from her last big file, the Toralan file. Ava needed to locate the documents on some uncollected receivables for her current file, a small one generated from her own contacts. A large paper mill from Detroit was buying out a smaller one in Hamilton, but the owner of the mill in Hamilton would retain an ongoing interest, including a seat on the board. Both parties had already signed a letter of intent and a confidentiality agreement.

Why hadn't Cory assigned her to another file? Ava knew she would need to work on much larger ones if she were going to become a partner. She had spent the past eight months under constant stress as the only associate assigned to Toralan from M&A. During that time, unhappiness had settled like a fog in her life, but when the deal had succeeded, the celebration at Harbour Club had been awash in champagne. Then Lester had left the firm, and Cory had become the head of the corporate department, and the fog in Ava's life had only thickened.

Fuck it. She tossed aside the file and stared out the window. At which point, on seeing that you've taken a wrong turn, do you change direction? At which point is it too late? From the forty-fifth floor of Canada Tower, Lake Ontario gleamed like an impossible dream. Lester had stranded her on Bay Street.

Ava had always wanted to go into the non-profit sector. Lester had convinced her to do otherwise: he had recruited her as an articling student, and after law school, he had invited her to join the firm as a junior associate in the corporate department, where he had persuaded her to focus on his own specialty, mergers and acquisitions. "Look, I used to be – I still am – a hippie," he had said in his compelling way, "but nothing has laid bare the framework of human civilization more clearly than the files I've worked on in M&A." For seven years, he had mentored Ava through increasingly complex transactions, taking her to the brink of partnership. And now he had left to provide bench strength to First Nations in their negotiations with the Crown, doing exactly the kind of work that Ava had once longed for. At his farewell dinner, he had said, "I believe that in our lifetime the First Nations are going to redefine what it means to be Canadian. We're innovating an entirely new configuration for citizenship and statehood. I'm tremendously hopeful. Miigwech and mahsi cho."

Get back to work, Ava told herself. Instead, she got up and went out to the kitchenette. The floor was quiet today. Half the M&A team were in New York on a large new file. Why hadn't Cory assigned her to it? In the kitchenette, she turned on the kettle, fished out her cell phone, and left a voicemail for Gavin, letting him know that she'd be out tonight. Then she remembered that he'd be out too. For a function at the bank? For dinner? For drinks? "Av, I'll be at …" What had he told her this morning?

Photo by Manjushree Thapa.

Jesus. How had she become so dreary, how had she become so dull? She who had been born to the jagged world: she had always known that there were alternative lives out there that she could slip into. She and Luke used to talk about this all the time growing up. When their parents adopted Ava as an infant and brought her from Kathmandu to Overland, Ontario, they had set her off in one direction, but she could choose another direction at any time. She could even reverse course if she wanted.

The kettle reached a boil and popped off. Ava made herself a cup of green tea and waited for it to steep, regretting those ten lost days.

She had spent all her time at the cottage talking. "Remember, Gav, when we got out of law school – we were different. I wanted to really do something, remember? I didn't want to end up on Bay Street. You didn't want to work at a bank. We're in a rut, Gav."

"A pretty comfortable rut, Av."

Georgian Bay had glittered around them as they spent every day – not arguing, because they never argued, but – deliberating. They hadn't got around to having sex even once. Ava couldn't actually remember the last time they had … was it after Gav's thirty-fifth at Oyster Boy? She had been busy on the Toralan file, and Gav had stopped initiating. Why had he stopped?

As she left the kitchenette with the cup of green tea, Ava saw Cory barrelling down the hall ahead of her. Her heart sank as she watched him barge into her office. When she came in, he was pacing back and forth like a caged animal.

Cory had a blunt manner that bordered on boorishness. "Ah-vah!" he said. He had told her, early on, that he found the pronunciation of her name pretentious. "What, were you taking a tea break, Ah-vah?" With a flick of a finger, he indicated that she should sit down.

Then he moved in closer to her desk, till his thighs were pressed up against the Toralan deal toy, and said, "Here's the thing, Ah-vah. Your evaluation's coming up, and, as you know, I'll be writing it this year."

A fog began to swirl in the office. Cory's voice floated in as if from far away:

"Now, we all know Lester was soft on his protegés, otherwise why would he have recommended you for partnership? But my view is? I'm not seeing a lot of motivation from your side, Ah-vah. I'm saying it as I see it, Ah-vah. You want a future at the firm? Then you and I, we need to talk."

Ava was already gone.

Photo by Manjushree Thapa.

IN HIS NARROW room in Sharjah, they lay entwined in the sheets, wrapped up in each other's heat and contentment. Maleah was talking, Gyanu was caressing her hair. On their days off, he loved losing himself in her words, swimming in the swirl of the sea in her stories and drifting along with her voice. When Maleah stopped talking, he murmured, "Tell more, meri maya."

She smiled. "What more you want me to tell, mahal?"

"Tell me: the men who catch fish."

"You always want to listen about that," she said.

She nestled in closer and told him about her father and brothers going out on their nightly excursions from their village in the Philippines. Gyanu could see the lamps glinting off the water as the trawlers receded into the night. He could hear the roar of the sea in her voice, he could taste the salt water in his mouth. The trawlers returned at sunrise as lorries rumbled into the village, setting the day in motion. The tuna catch was transported to a cannery, from where it was shipped to towns all over the South China Sea.

Some of the leftovers ended up in the village homes. "Every day we eat fish, depends on the season," Maleah said. "There is rice and plantain, my mother cooks that first. My father and brothers come back, then she cooks" – her English fell away – "bilong-bilong, apahap, kabayo, lapu-lapu."

She often cooked sea bass for Gyanu, infusing his room with the coconut, lemongrass, and lime leaf of her fishing village. They usually shared leftovers from Five Spices, though when there was time, Gyanu would also cook, flavouring his meals with fenugreek and mustard, turmeric and dried chives: the hard rock and soil of Nepal.

With Maleah, Gyanu escaped his past. He loved everything about her. He knew that Maleah had married young. At sixteen she had run away with a boy from town who kept bad company, though with her he was tender. She was happy till his body showed up in the cannery garbage dump. Their son Crisanto now lived with his grandparents. "My anak will never know his father," Maleah had said once, and her sadness had unleashed Gyanu's.

But Maleah was talking, now, of happiness: the meals her mother used to cook as she and her father and brothers sat around the kitchen, waiting to eat. "There was nothing," she said, and he felt the innocence of childhood: a feeling of plenty. She said, "There was no big house, no fancy furniture, no nice clothes, no money. But there was love, so there was everything." She turned to Gyanu. "Like when you were a boy, mahal?"

He nodded, thinking back to the day Ma brought him to the village by the blue hills, to the house of the stranger who would become his ba. Gyanu was fortunate. His stepfather was a kind man. After Sapana's birth, the scandal around Ma and Ba's marriage subsided, and their family was whole – till encephalitis took Ma. Now cancer was claiming Ba. The last time Gyanu called home, his sister had said their father was asking for him: "Ba needs a son to light the funeral pyre, Dai. And he wants to see you one last time."
Maleah noticed his silence and asked, "You talked to your sister, mahal?"

"My father will not live long, meri maya."

"You booked the ticket?"

"I booked it," he said. He hadn't, however, asked Shantanu Kumar for leave. The Indian manager of Five Spices was fond of Gyanu; he used to call him his Nepali beta, his Nepali son; but Gyanu knew that no one was indispensable in the desert. He had learned this well over his years as a busboy at the Al Majaz in Abu Dhabi, a kitchen hand at the Safeer Café in Sharjah, and a mess chef in the Ramla Restaurant in Burj Khalifa. Only when Shantanu Kumar hired him as a sous chef at Five Spices had Gyanu found stability. He would have to risk it to visit his father.

He didn't say more on the subject, and neither did Maleah. They were accustomed to living in uncertainty in a land they could never settle in permanently. Maleah had come here on a two-year contract. One of her roommates was looking for work as an au pair in Europe. Another was looking for alternatives in childcare. Maleah was enrolled in an English class and had convinced Gyanu to do the same. She sometimes talked about moving elsewhere. She wanted to live with Crisanto somewhere, anywhere, where she could give him the kind of full, free childhood that she'd had.

For now, she reserved all of her love for Gyanu. Their few hours together always raced by. It was already quiet next door: the Tamil construction crew had left for the day. The neon sign at the Al Faraby Hyper Express blinked on as the dusk deepened. Maleah would have to leave soon.

Gyanu propped himself up in bed to look at her. Maleah Balana. He had seen her one Sunday while accompanying his roommate Jairus to church: her head bowed, her face framed by lace. "Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." He had heard her whispered incantations. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." How had he won her love, how was he going to keep her? Moving his hands over her shoulders, he felt the grace of her in his life. He removed the sheet and took in the sight of her pale body against his dark skin. They had been lovers for a year, and he couldn't envision a life without her.

"Mahal," she whispered.

"Meri maya," Gyanu said. My love. He leaned in to kiss her, and she arched her back, drawing her legs up to close him in to her.

Photo by Manjushree Thapa.

OF ALL THE European cities Indira had travelled to for work – London and Brussels, Helsinki and Cologne, Copenhagen and of course Frankfurt, several times – Paris was definitely the prettiest. Indira had been here before, eighteen-nineteen years ago, for her first-ever international conference, a UNIFEM summit on women: she remembered it warmly as a blur of national costumes and inspirational speeches. The best part was the city tour at the end. The delegates had been taken to the famous boulevard, the Champs-élysées, and from a stone bridge Indira had taken photos of the Seine. Where were those photos now? Awed by all she had seen, she had vowed to return, and now here she was, back in Paris!

A fashionable lady in stilettos sashayed by. A boy drove his scooter onto the sidewalk and stopped in front of an automated teller. A tall man in a tailored suit cavorted down the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette.

Indira shadowed the man so as not to be spotted by the organizers of the Women's Empowerment Initiative. There were, in her experience, two kinds of conferences in this world. The first was organized by veterans from the developing world, who understood that formal interactions were greatly enhanced by informal activities such as sightseeing or gift shopping. Indira had formed lasting bonds at such conferences. Years later, she still kept in touch with Abena Kwasima from Accra, Rudo Gamble from Cape Town, W. Werry from Jakarta, Mei Wang from Shanghai, Juana Hernández from Lima, and the formidable Kadri Pütsep from Tallinn. Together they formed a sisterhood of global change-makers.

The Women's Empowerment Initiative was, however, the other kind of conference, the kind organized by amateurs, usually American, who tried to squeeze out too many outcomes in too little time. From the very first Inspire! Breakfast on, Indira had had to pursue an asset-based approach using the principles of appreciative inquiry to discuss her work at WDS-Nepal. All day long, she had been trapped in lectures and workshops, and in the evenings, she had had to attend Solidarity! Dinners with earnest cultural shows: a one-woman play set in Ciudad Juárez, an all-woman Roma folk band. Tonight there would be a slideshow on female genital mutilation. And tomorrow morning she would leave.

Why organize a conference in Paris at all? Why not meet, as WDS-International had one dire, under-funded year, at an airport hotel in Frankfurt? Why not save money and teleconference, for that matter, or video chat, Skype-shype, Viber-shiber – all that?

The tall man turned abruptly into an alley. Spotting a stately stone bridge directly ahead, Indira hurried towards it. Having stolen out of a session on role playing, she had two hours, or maybe three, to buy a present for Aakriti, for having passed out of ninth class. Indira also had to pick up something for Muwa, though nothing would ever please her witch of a mother-in-law. Aakaash was easy: she would buy him a computer game at the airport duty-free; and two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label would suffice for Uday Sharma.

Indira reached the bridge, and her heart fluttered: was it – could it be – it was! It was the very same bridge she had been to nineteen years ago! She reached for the railing as she would for an old friend, and found the stone smooth and hard and warm to the touch. Oh! She had once been young here.

She walked the length of the bridge, overcome with nostalgia.

On the far side of the bridge, she came across a row of boutiques. A mannequin in a slinky dress stood in one boutique window. A dress would be perfect for Aakriti, she thought – not this one, the neckline was low, but a dress from Paris would be perfect for her daughter.

The next window contained an array of jars filled with fruits, vegetables, and nuts: dried, oiled, marinated, pickled, preserved. Yet another window was decorated with fine white lace panties. Another contained nothing but wine. Here, she lingered. The bottles – white, red, rosé – glinted like precious gems in the sunlight. She imagined Uday Sharma lifting a long-stemmed goblet and toasting, "To you, Indira Sharma. To our marriage of twenty years."

"To us."

"No, to you."

It wouldn't happen, not in this lifetime. Whenever Indira was in the developed world, she always rued the way she, as a Nepali, was obliged to blunder through life without grace, without refinement, merely getting the needful done. Emotionally it saddened her, though rationally she understood why it was so. There was no comparing and contrasting the life of a Kathmanduite with the life of a Parisian, because the developed world was the developed world, and Nepal was Nepal.

Next to the wine shop was a beauty parlour. On an impulse, she went in: she would buy a face cream for Muwa here. A bell tinkled. The interior smelled like roses. A redheaded saleslady came up to her, high heels clacking, and after babbling in French switched to English: "May I help you, Madame?"

"I need a face cream," Indira said, pointing at a jar on a shelf.

"Ah, oui, there is much desiccation." The saleslady whisked out a magnifying mirror and held it up to Indira's face, assaulting her with a vision of the furrows and grooves, dots and patches, stains and blotches on her middle-aged face. To Indira's horror, the lines under her eyes had deepened, and her complexion, once clear, looked mottled.

Briskly, the saleslady said, "I strongly recommend a treatment, for you it is urgent, Madame." She mentioned something called Eau Vitesse. "That will make the skin tight, but my advice is to go for microdermabrasion. It aids the revitalization of youth."

Indira noted that the saleslady herself had flawless complexion, even though she was – how old? Quite old. "How much?" she ventured to ask.

"Just one hour, Madame."

"No, no. How much money is it costing?"

It came to over twelve thousand, when converted into Nepali rupees!

Twelve thousand rupees for a beauty treatment! That was simply immoral! Though, of course, Indira's per diem could easily cover it, and it wasn't unreasonable when you converted the cost back into euros. Plus, a treatment, as the lady said, was urgent for her. A global change-maker ought to look good. Also, a beauty treatment in Paris: when would she ever get this chance again? But then again – twelve thousand rupees! Oof. Chances taken and opportunities missed, longings and qualms, desires and disappointments pulsated through Indira – yes, no, yes, no – till with profound regret she decided: "I will take one face cream only."

"Bof. Your choice, Madame."

High heels clacking, the saleslady took a jar to the cash register.

The bill came to nine thousand rupees.

Nine thousand rupees for a jar of face cream! A high-quality cream, to be sure, a cream from a beauty parlour in Paris. She shouldn't waste it on Muwa. It would be a gift to herself.

As Indira left, the saleslady called out, "Au revoir!"

"Bonjour," Indira replied grimly.

Outside, she felt just awful. What was she doing buying a nine-thousand-rupee face cream for herself? What did she think, that it would bring back her youth? That Uday Sharma would notice, and they would recover their marital happiness? What? Walking along the row of boutiques looking for a dress for Aakriti, she excoriated herself:

Look at yourself, Indira Sharma. Tchee! Look. Just look at what you've become.

Photo by Manjushree Thapa.

A WATERY LIGHT filtered through the banana plants, dappling the lawn with crazy dancing shadows. Sapana was sitting with her back to Kakarvitta bazaar, looking out at a bridge. The land on this side of the bridge? This was Nepal. And the land on the other side was India.

"Can't we go?" Sapana asked, though she knew perfectly well that they couldn't. "Just for a minute," she said. "Just so we can tell everyone at home that we went abroad on this trip."

Around her, the women tittered. They were waiting around indolently for their midday meal on this, the final day of their study tour. They were completely worn out. Over the past five days they had visited a cooperative dairy, a pig farm, a carpet factory, a fish hatchery, and a tea estate. They had gone to a silk factory and seen silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves. They had met women who earned an income selling baskets, brooms, cardamom, vegetables, nuts, dried fruits, and just about everything else. Every day had been full of discovery, every evening had been full of fun.

If only Chandra had been on the tour, then it would have been perfect, Sapana thought. Sapana was hoarding her observations to share with Chandra when she got home. There should have been other girls of her age on the tour, really. Sapana had, herself, been included by favour of her uncle, Thulo-ba, only after the chairperson of the women's committee pulled out, saying her family couldn't spare her for a week. Ba, her father, couldn't spare Sapana either, but Chandra had insisted: "Ey, girl, aren't I here to care for your ba? Haven't I been here for you all these years? Don't miss this chance. Go."

As far as Sapana could tell, this study tour was the only thing her thulo-ba's sham CBO had ever done for the women's committee. The women's committee was itself a sham: half of its members couldn't even read or write! No one in the village knew why the CBO had even bothered to set it up. But then the CBO – which, Sapana had learned on the tour, stood for "community-based organization" in English – was just a means to fund Thulo-ba's politics. There was no point expecting much from it.

But this was no time to be negative: this was a moment to savour. The light, the lawn, the women. There, past the bridge: India. "Can't we go?" Sapana asked again.

Rama-bhauju, who was sitting beside her, called out to their minder, the widower Jeevan Bhatta: "Lau, Secretary-ji, you're going to have to turn this into an international tour, re!"

The other women tittered.

Jeevan Bhatta flashed them a loopy grin. He looked a fool, but was the secretary of the CBO, and Thulo-ba's most trusted political worker. "If I were to take you across the border," he said, leering,"the police would nab me."

"Why?" Rama-bhauju demanded. "Is it against the law to go to India?"

"They'd think I was going to sell you-all to a brothel!"

"Haaa!" Rama-bhauju's face soured.

Jeevan Bhatta guffawed.

Sapana grimaced. What a horrid joke! It immediately made her think of Chandra's sister, Surya-di. After failing out of tenth class, Surya-di had decided not to marry. She had decided to look for work instead. She had always been a different kind of girl, plucky and bold. A family friend knew a manpower agent in Kathmandu, and over the phone, the agent said that he would find Surya-di a salaried job in India's capital, Delhi. "I'll be the son you never had," Surya-di had told her muwa-buwa. "I'll send money home so that Chandra and little Tara can study."

The lodge owner began to serve the women dal-bhat-tarkaari – a simple dish of rice, lentils, and vegetables – steaming hot in aluminum thalis, but Sapana didn't feel like eating any more.

What excitement there had been on the day Surya-di left! Sapana and Chandra had escorted Surya-di all the way to the highway. "You girls, don't be like me," Surya-di had said sternly. "Study hard. Pass out of school. Make something of yourselves. Take care of Muwa-Buwa. Help raise little Tara. Always be good."

The agent was waiting at the highway with a van. He had a wiry moustache, and Sapana and Chandra kept looking at him and giggling. They found that moustache so funny. Two of Surya-di's friends from school were also going with her. After they arrived, the van drove away, and Sapana and Chandra raced all the way home.

A few days later, when Chandra's muwa-buwa phoned the agent, they found his line disconnected. Neither they nor the other families ever heard from their daughters again.

"Ey, girl!" Rama-bhauju nudged Sapana. "Your food's getting cold."

"I'm not hungry, Bhauju."

"It's a twenty-hour bus ride! Think about how hungry you'll be in six hours, and eat!" After saying this, Rama-bhauju burst into laughter. "That's why I'm fat – I'm always eating because I think I might get hungry in six hours!"

Sapana looked at her. Rama-bhauju was so good-natured. Just last year, Rama-bhauju's schoolmaster husband left her for a young new wife. Rama-bhauju was raising their four children all by herself, but looking at her you would never know she had any troubles.

The others on the tour – Jethi-didi, Laxmi-aama, Kanchan-bhauju, Naina-di, Hasta-ma – all had their own troubles too, as, of course, did Sapana. Sapana had lost Ma only a few years ago, and now she was going to lose Ba. But then all of us experience sorrow, she thought: and yet here we are, across the country, on a study tour, in an animated discussion about – what?

Yogurt. "The yogurt from here is famous," Jethi-didi was saying, prompting Naina-di to say, "Ssss! A bowl of fresh yogurt would be so refreshing at the end of this meal!"

"There's nothing in this world like fresh yogurt," Rama-bhauju declared.

"Ssss, now I really want some!"

"Sahu-ji!" Rama-bhauju called out to the lodge owner. "Give us some yogurt, will you?"

The lodge owner shrugged. "The batch I made this morning is finished."

"Buy some from another hotel, then!"

"Do that!" The others chimed in: "We came all the way across the country to try the yogurt."

"Lau na, Sahu-ji!"

"We won't leave till we have some world-famous yogurt!"

With another shrug, the lodge owner went to find them some yogurt.

A cheer went up at this small victory. Sapana had to smile. As much of a sham as this women's committee was, it was fun to be part of. The tour had given her a respite from the sadness around Ba's cancer. Sapana felt lucky to be here. She felt grateful – to the committee, to Thulo-ba, and even to Jeevan Bhatta, for if the old widower hadn't started the women's committee, this tour wouldn't have taken place at all. So what if he and Thulo-ba were profiting off the CBO? Whoever had given them the money for the tour had also enriched Sapana's life; and anyway, maybe there's no such thing as ‘my life' or ‘your life,' Sapana thought. Maybe everyone's life is part of a whole. It felt so to her, because when she thought about it, she felt that the actions of one person shape the lives of others, and … don't all of us in our own lives shape the lives of others? We do. It's like a pattern, she thought. Not a pattern, but some kind of design, some kind of order. Chandra always said there's no God, and maybe she was right, but to Sapana it felt as though …

"Ey, girl! Eat! Or, you'll be hungry in six hours!"

Sapana smiled. She loved Rama-bhauju so much right now. She loved all the members of the women's committee; and actually, right now, she loved life.

She drew the dal-bhat-tarkaari towards her and began to eat.

Manjushree Thapa was born in Kathmandu and raised in Nepal, Canada, and the United States. She has written several books of fiction and non-fiction.

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The Vetāla of False Creek

Rungh Editor — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 21:53:33 +0000

Vol. 5, No. 3 / Fiction

The Vetāla of False Creek

By Kiran Kuar; illustrations by Sroop Sunar; photography by Deena Dinat

੫ |

Did you know that the Fraser begins in the land of Mount Robson? It winds its way across the midriff of BC and down into this place where we are, before it screams, pulled with the force of the entire ocean, into the sea. You loved this area; the arms of the Fraser grasping Sea and Lulu the way arteries keep themselves drifting into the heart.

੪ |

Your mother always tells you things at the decibel of a yell, as though she and every other Punjabi ma got together and decided this was the best way to make a point of being heard, the daily mutiny has been going for women long before 1857. Right now, she is yelling across this beautiful, beige Richmond-sized house for you to come to the kitchen and eat the fresh jalebis. I stuff a pile of them into our mouth praying she won’t look too hard, syrup bleeding orange across our chin. This dead body has, after all, forgotten how to swallow.

If I told you vetālas were real, you might not believe me, the aberration of our moment torn between a future of taxis hovering on invisible energy so quiet they scare their own drivers and my existence so fleeting except when I inhabit a body, animatus animalis, double trouble, I becoming we for a sweet moment. There is nothing more revolutionary than the collective they say now. Me, a collective by my very nature, princely, no, queenly, in this kingdom of us.

I had been roaming for a while when I found you about to shoot yourself. If I had kept on roaming, I could have told you that soon you would be lying on the taupe carpet, blood unfairly splayed like strands of jalebi, and a thin metal shotgun beside you, belly to be bloated from beer and the deep breaths of the act of dying. And if I had kept on, I could have told you that in a few minutes, your mother, sister, everyone would be running, running towards your room, with complete terror still believing that the sound was from someone else's beautiful beige house, even though deep down, the sound was too familiar, made by a gun that had been confiscated, but never disposed of, because in this world, what else are the top shelves of garages for but the things that you are not rich enough to buy again, no matter how absurd it might be to keep them. If I had kept on, I would have continued to hear the screams and whispers for days, nono,howdidthishappen and the wails of collective guilt at their failure to stop you on your third try. If I had kept on, I would have been a witness to your mother’s loss, and every mother’s loss as they called their sons to them, your childhood friends, your cousins, and how they beat their backs as though one can wail the desire to live back in to someone. There are some things that even douchey spirits cannot bear. Mine is the last face you see alive, or the first face you see dead as I muffle, between you and the gun, bracing for a quiet departure as you shoot through us.

There had been signs. The late nights, termination from your loss prevention job at the Superstore, long disappearances and even longer trips to the 7-11 down on No. 1 Street. Peculiar moods and abrupt moments, holes punched into walls and extensive apologies, broken fingers and broken noses. The fetal position is the opposite of the corpse. They had tried to treat you with pharmaceuticals, the kind that reduce you and press into flesh. And of course, self-medications, memories of that roaming, a ghostly flow and scutter that never quite leaves the body once it enters.

੩ |

The jalebis sit in your throat glommed together and then we look at your mother one last time because we think you forgot to do that and we tell her you love her, she doesn’t respond, maybe because it came out as a whisper over the bristles of bloody orange clots in your mouth, and maybe because we haven’t quite figured out how to speak you yet. We walk you through the back of the house so she won't find you where you tried to asphyxiate yourself this morning, before you realized that it would have to be the gun, because vents were put in the garage after your father underwent this same crossing last year. Your mother will be confused about the car running and the carpets on the floor, wondering where you are and if this is the ghost of her husband coming to visit. She will thank her blessings you are not there; they won't find you until three days later.

Every vetāla has its own design, but I like to place things where they belong, finding the backs to where they came from, waterwombs that resemble passages of heartache, creeks of falsehood, no room for ashes, our pilgrimage of this body to a place fitted for you. I couldn’t save you, but surrendering your body in return for whatever spirit is left of your mother is something we can try at.

Our body had to be inhabited, pulled up and thrust back into the world of the living at an hour of quiet. I forced you up, and burrowed myself in through the heart wound. This kind of service, this violent rebirth, is only ever kindness. I poured my energy with force into the nerves, occupying dendrites and follicles and cells, becoming us.

It might seem strange to be a benevolent inhabitor, a spirit to usher the body after the spirit departs from the body into the ether, but someone has to take responsibility. Your body is beautiful, dark and rippled itself. Alive, it had been a marvel, thick and arrogant from kung fu classes and a rude mother, strapped into ADIDAS sweatsuits and tevas with white socks. A little silver earring and short hair with a dream of a wave running through it. Teal convertibles with a teal light that shone under at night, the eeriness leaving parental throats dry and making nephews and nieces marvel.

You have been fooled. As they have told me, the heart is my fist and the night is my mouth and I will own you tonight. The most beautiful bodies we wish to inhabit are the tawny ones, still yet bristling with youth at the tips of their moustaches. The sweetness of breath still there. You, my boy, are a bit different, your mouth a bit overladen, and your eyes a bit too alive, glassed over from the trench of the city to the trench of the medical industry, crystals the softest of them all; once your mother found what she thought were shards of misri behind the toaster, another time, in the depths of the velvet brown couch. She would throw them out, quietly. Everyone knows Punjabi boys were never good at hiding things from their mothers, the brazen with which they barely bother; your mother, pulling the unwritten codes of silence from an ancestral bank of memory on how to live with boys ravenous.

੨ |

There are no basements in Richmond, the silt deposit too hungering for a fold inwards from tractors. The houses sit completely aboveground on foundations always at risk of sinking, and that makes our task all the more difficult, your bedroom upstairs near the kitchen and living room.

I can only inhabit such freshness for so long, unaware of the damage of dragging our body around, a destructive act. I can feel our body, musk over tendon and bone, muscles stiffening for horizons of rest. We slump as we move, a little to the right, your physique gone into algor mortis.

As we begin this pilgrimage, we can feel the sweetness of some of your memories tugging like your nieces back and forth on the comforter in the bedroom until you swooped it up over them holding down the edges until they begged laughing, little voices rising up in a chorus of mercymercymercy but ever so slightly strained with real fear; or that beautiful girlfriend – the one that made your heart thump so hard, we can still feel where the cavity in your chest widened for her – she with her bubblegum-scented hair and fishtail eyes. There is a house with pale yellow wood paneling, Vancouver special balconies most prominently-featured in Richmond, a sloping roof and mustard brick pillars, your family's first home in the city. And then the sweet smells of Steveston reeds, crickets and caterpillars billowing happily, the ghosts of Japanese fishermen with their lines and Musqueam fishermen with their nets trailing into the slough. Their heads turn slowly to watch my effort, eyes rolling back in laughter or exhaustion. I give them the finger as we go by and their eyes spool even more fervently, or perhaps I imagine that too.

੧ |

The walk is the hardest here. Ghosts may like to float, but vetālas do not, irascibly bound to the containers that we are charged with by the fear of losing them to currents. Water fills in everywhere, the ears, pores, eyes, orificial worship.

No one would remember, but I can feel our arm hairs bristling from the streams of memory, the beach on the island, Iona the provider of a deep well for pennies of disappointment. Here is where you took that beautiful girl to tell her that you loved her, the beach cold and dark and wet, a glistening mud bath from the rain with swashes of herons in their grizzled winter cloaks and seadrunk driftwood. The eel grasses flowing back and forth, and the whinny of a horse off in the distance. This is silken country you would think, running your mouth over her body as you whispered devotion.

She leaves you, respectfully, for university. She leaves crevasses where her braid would fall when she leaned her head against your chest: you are left with nothing to fault her for, nothing to salve your ego with except a brute awakening to your own inferiority.

The arm of the river between the airport and the river park is covered in waterbugs this time of year, there are eagles flying overhead, on a circuit that they believe themselves to be the makers of. Little are they aware of how all the minnows and big fish rush away from me in terror, spanning out in fractals. The banks are infiltrated with swathes of white pollen, and the thick strains of light green seaweed that wrap and grasp like the last good mother and her mother before her. The tugboat overhead is strong, its shadow opinionated and weighing. The gulls feel safe in spite of what is going on below them, smooth pebbles and salmon skip. A large tree knot sits on perpetual river watch, its third eye readied for every ship and body come. It shudders at our entry onto the bank.

We walk up Granville, industrial lights so near to the Superstore where you used to work. The stretch up from here is long and hard, our muscles already forgetting how to ascend elevation. We limp and shuffle through Shaughnessy and no one bothers us because you are not, never were, enough to be worth bothering for. Remember the time they set the dogs on you, thinking you were someone else? You held those bites in your holding cell like they were from kisses. Only now, is this a blessing, our inconspicuousness emergent.

Here along the False Creek seawall, beneath the bridges, there is nothing left but a small ledge and a bunch of rocks to cross. That night, the water shines brightly, the lights of the city glass and little Aquabuses faltering along in ripples. A red-footed bird had found its way up and out of the fjord, survival borne out of shit and the ghosts of oysters. The strangeness of coming to the paved over tarmac banks where we can feel the seeds waiting to sprout to no answer from the sun, and then they shrivel and dissolve back into the earth. The dead are, in fact, the most attuned to the living. We pass by the wisps of spirits and they wave us along on our task, to return you even if somewhat imperfectly, to join leagues of brown children who find themselves drifting at the bottom.

੦ |

If the hagfish could speak, they would whisper that the water here has a scent to it. It sluices over our arms as we pour in and trudge riverbed rush. Somehow our dead weight keeps an orientation that only these eel-like creatures with their wide mouths and pretty petty sea eyes can see. A tiny shrimp begins to poke at the bits of sugar bleed left around our lips and our mouth opens to give it a new home amongst the fissures. Seawater drenches in and you sink in a gross exhalation, tongue becoming an ebb and flow itself. Our eyelids shuffle closed. I leave you moneyless, wishing I could have caressed an earlobe, but there was only so much movement, and only so much time. Revelry is not for those like me. You still wear a single earring, playthings for squids. You can be marrow for this seabed until they find you. False Creek, they called it, never really beautiful, half filled in for the mismanaged dreams of a railway. A buried creek wanting for everything, the eastern basin covered by stone and cement echoes a lament, scaring the fish into spectral crevices. Perfect for you.

Kiran Kaur is a writer who was born on the traditional territories of the Sinixt peoples, and the Ktunaxa peoples. They are currently at work on a queer Punjabi love saga entitled, Nerve, as well as a collection of Punjabi ghost stories. They live with their parents.

Sroop Sunar is a London based illustrator. She's worked with clients such as Penguin, Random House and The New York Times, and has exhibited in London and Berlin.

Deena Dinat is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of British Columbia. His work concerns the intersections of the nation, post-colonial capitalism and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

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