Everything Was Good-Bye (32 page)

It is ten-thirty.

I pick up my cup of cold chai and go downstairs to reheat it for the third time. I know I won’t drink it. I’ll just watch it turn in the microwave, listen
to the oscillating hum over rain, count the rain drops that hit the window, watch them spread into veins that stretch across my reflection and wonder why all I know how to do is wait. But for what I still don’t know.

It is eleven o’clock.

A knock at the door.

“Is it too late?” Kal asks.

“No, it’s fine.” I open the door barely the width of half his shoulder. His arm scrapes the door jamb and rain beads off his jacket onto the hardwood floor.

“One hell of a storm tonight,” he says as he hangs his coat up. “Leena asleep?”

I nod and follow him into the living room, where he turns offthree of the four lamps before sitting down. “She had a great time at the movies. Thanks for taking her.”

“I had a good time too. She’s a great kid… Liam would’ve been proud of the way you’ve raised her. She’s pretty incredible.”

A silence follows. I never know what to say when he speaks of Liam so I say nothing.

“You know I love her like my own.” Kal puts his arm over my shoulder and pulls me closer. “I love you both like–”

I raise my shoulders, pushing his words from my ears.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Nothing.” I rush out of the room as though I’ve suddenly remembered that I’ve left milk boiling on the stove.

“When, Meena? When is it going to be something?” He follows me into the kitchen.

“What about Irmila?”

“What about her? She’s the one that filed for the divorce.”

I take my cup of chai out of the microwave and tip it into the sink, watch it circle the drain. “You could work things out.”

“What’s there to work out? We don’t want the same things.”

“And by things, you mean kids.”

He nodded. “You know I want a family. I want what you have.”

“You mean what I had.”

“No, I mean what you have right now. You’re so lucky to have Leena…Sometimes I think you spend so much time missing Liam that you can’t feel anything for anyone else.”

“This isn’t about me. It’s about you… You could still work it out with Irmila if you wanted to.”

“No. It’s too late. You know her. She’s always thought that I loved you and well, now I realize that she’s probably right.” He presses his body against mine and I close my eyes to the weight of him, wondering who is giving and who is taking in this portrayal of love, in my betrayal of love.

Afterwards, I shower. I know the pulse muffles the sound of my tears and the soapy water excuses my red eyes. When I emerge, Kal is half-dressed. I wonder if he heard me crying this time.

“Do you hate me for this?” he asks, stretching his sweater over his head. I find it difficult to answer the question and look away as he buttons his pants. In a way, I do hate him. I hate both of us for being a reminder of everything we’ve lost. Even my mother warned me, asking me what I would tell Leena when she was older. Would I tell her that I was once married to the man who was imprisoned for killing her father? A man who was Kal’s cousin. “The wounds are too deep, too close,” my mother told me. “You cannot heal one another.” I tried to take her advice, but couldn’t.

Kal is waiting for an answer. Unlike Liam, he is frightened of my silence. “I don’t hate you, I just don’t know what this is. Are we friends? Are we lovers? I just feel like I can’t give you what you need.”

“What I need is you.”

“And is this enough?” I ask.

“It has to be,” he says, walking out the door.

I rush down the stairs after him. “Kal, wait.”

He stops at the front door. “I’ll wait, Meena… I’ve always waited.”

I let him go, but stand at the closed door with my hand pressed against it until I hear Leena’s voice behind me.

“Is he coming back?” she asks, her eyes half obscured by the tumbling curls she refuses to let me cut.

I smile, scoop her up in my arms and brush the hair from her eyes. “Yes, but not today.”

“Is he going to be my daddy?” I smile, though inside I feel old wounds opening.

“You have a daddy,” I say, placing her into her bed, smoothing out her rumpled sheets. “He loved you very much.”

She looks at Liam’s picture by her bed. “Does it hurt to be dead?” “No,” I answer, punctuating my answer with a kiss on her nose before getting up to leave.

“What does it feel like?”

I climb into bed with her. “I’m not sure. Maybe like sleep.”

“Like in “Sleeping Beauty?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Will he ever wake up?” she looks up at me with his eyes.

I wrap my hand in hers and snuggle in, caressing her hair. “No, he won’t.” I hold her close until her breath softens and she falls into the long length of a dream. “It’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re fine… you’re fine.”

ABOUT THE BOOK

Set in lower mainland British Columbia,
Everything Was Good-bye
is a moving modern-day story about a young Indo-Canadian woman named Meena who’s struggling to find her place in the world. Caught between the traditional values of her family and her desire to have the same freedom as other Canadian women, Meena is faced with difficult choices— and her decisions will lead to tragic consequences for everyone involved.

We first meet Meena as a seventeen-year-old girl in her last year of high school. Her family immigrated to Canada when she was still a baby, and soon after that her father was killed in a workplace accident, leaving her mother with the task of raising six daughters on her own. It is an onerous task not only because she must support the family, but she must also ensure that her daughters are all placed in acceptable arranged marriages. As the youngest daughter, Meena is expected to obey her mother and follow in her sisters’ footsteps: “We dressed modestly, hiding our flesh, living somewhere deep inside our skins—chaste and quiet.” But as a headstrong and rebellious teenager, Meena refuses to accept the role that has been assigned to her.

In school, Meena is an outcast—she doesn’t fit in with any of the social groups—until she meets Liam, who seems to be the only one who accepts her for who she is. Her mother forbids her from seeing him for fear of ugly rumours spreading in the close-knit Punjabi community, but Meena recklessly disobeys. Upon graduation, Liam announces that he wants to run away to Toronto and asks Meena to come with him. Torn between her desire to be with him and her obligations to her family, she hesitates, and he disappears.

A few years down the road Meena is a young career woman still living at home with her mother. Facing increased pressure to accept an arranged marriage, she finally agrees to marry Sunny, a successful lawyer and the son of a prominent Indo-Canadian family. Neither Meena nor Sunny are truly happy, but both agree to the marriage in order to please their families. But when Liam reappears in Meena’s life she must confront her true feelings. She is faced with the difficult choice of leading a life that fulfills her family’s expectations or a life that fulfills her own.

Debut novelist Gurjinder Basran has created a world filled with fas-cinatingly complex characters in a powerful, uniquely Canadian story. Beautifully written and searingly honest,
Everything Was Good-bye
is a novel that explores the meaning of love, the pain of heartbreak, and the journey toward self-acceptance.
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AN INTERVIEW WITH GURJINDER BASRAN

The idea for
Everything Was Good-bye
grew out of some journaling and storytelling my sisters and I were doing around our own shared history. While writing vignettes about my childhood, I found myself fictionaliz-ing details and reordering events, and by doing so the stories seemed to get to a truth that the facts did not expose. This is, of course, the wonderful thing about fiction—you can abandon the facts in favour of the truth. Because
Everything Was Good-bye
was imagined and informed by portions of my own life, Meena and I share some history. I grew up in a similar environment and endured many of the same struggles with identity and cultural expectations. However, the more I wrote about Meena, the more she took on a life of her own, a life that ended up being quite different from my own. ■

From the early 1970s and onward, Meena’s family experiences racism in a variety of ways. They endure violence, vandalism of property, prejudicial attitudes, and racial taunts, but as times goes on the racism becomes less overt, partly because society has become more aware and partly because of the growing diversity in the Canadian population. I’ve come to believe that this is still the case. Racism is not as obvious as it was, but prejudicial attitudes are still prevalent and often displayed without malicious intentions. Even though we have a multicultural country, there is still little cultural understanding, and as such many people form generalizations which can be harmful and lead to the mar-ginalization of ethnic communities.■

I don’t think you can escape the bond of family, nor do I think you should. Family can be your greatest source of strength and community, and even though there are expectations that come with those relationships, there are ways to navigate those expectations. A big part of that navigation comes with communication and a deep understanding of self. It is difficult to engage in meaningful and fulfilling relationships when no one is clear about their intentions or why they are behaving the way they are. This is the case with many families. They tend to take each other for granted and work in hierarchies that are unearned.
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When I started writing, Liam was one of the first characters to appear on the page. He was full of contradictions, and unlike the other characters in the book he was at ease with it in a way that suggested he was at peace with himself or had accepted his limitations. Meena on the other hand was difficult to write about. Since I was drawing on some of my own experiences to inform her life, I thought writing her would be easy, but it actually made it harder until I got to the place where I could dissociate myself and start thinking like her rather than thinking like me.■

Sunny is a product of his environment in much the same way Meena is. He was raised with certain norms and expectations that cause him to behave the way he does. His life sets him up with a false sense of entitlement and hers sets her up with an unfair sense of loss. I have a good deal of compassion for Sunny; he could have been a far better man than he actually was, and I believe that if he’d been willing, he and Meena could have built a life together—but both of them were so caught in their own pasts that they couldn’t move forward. In the end it’s only because Sunny was raised with entitlement that he feels the need to control Meena, or that he feels justified in his anger at her fleeting happiness.

The general response has been positive. Most of the readers I’ve met felt connected to the narrative and said that the book validated many of their own experiences. Of course there are some who found the content shocking or too revealing but that doesn’t concern me, because I think the truth can be uncomfortable to read. I’ve always thought that a story should entertain, enlighten, and cause the reader to question his or her own beliefs. The fact that the novel has encouraged dialogue amongst readers has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the writing.
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Most people are surprised to learn that I was never a great reader. Books were not a part of my home life, and though I had a library card, I didn’t own a book until I was seventeen. Now, in an attempt to make up for lost time, I have a broad reading spectrum, but in general I tend to read literary fiction and am inspired by Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa