Everything Was Good-Bye (5 page)

As I often did, I dipped my hand into the pocket of the coat. My fingers fumbled in search of the heart-shaped glass bottle. I held it in my palm for a second. Somehow, it seemed an important thing to do.

I always wondered why my mother had left the perfume in the pocket, the coat in the closet: all this beauty locked away. Poor beast. She’d never worn the coat since his death.

“Meena? Is that you?” my mother called out.

“Yeah, coming!” I shut the closet door, picked up the pieces of mail that were on the floor, and riffled through them as I walked up the stairs into the kitchen. I handed my father’s Workers’ Compensation Board cheque to my mother along with a stack of flyers. This simple, unapologetic envelope that arrived once a month was our patriarch, its contents meant to replace the sum of a man.

My mother was holding the phone between her shoulder and ear, and walking around the kitchen in square sweeps like a trapped housefly as she complained to Masi in random and regular patterns that the rain had spoiled the fields, forcing her to come home early, and that she would likely have to take Tej with her to make up the time on Saturday. Unlike my older sisters, who spent their summers toiling in the fields with my mother, I hadn’t gone since I was eight years old.

That last time we’d loaded into the contractor’s VW van at five in the morning, shoulder to shoulder along the wooden benches that replaced seats, trying not to slide into each other as the van turned corners. I sat on the end of the bench clutching the side to keep myself from falling into the cracked window held together with duct tape. By six the van was full of mothers, grandmothers, daughters and granddaughters. All were silent, except the toddler who shuffled in her mother’s arms and the contractor man who sang Hindi songs that I whispered along to under my breath.

That day I could not keep up with my mother; the piece rate of pay distanced even her shouts for me to hurry. When my sisters came to look for me, I was playing hide-and-seek in the rows of bushes by the ditch with the other children. They scolded me, reminding me of the three boys, no older than me, who had drowned in a gravel pit on a farm in Langley the week before. I thought of the news, the protesters demanding safe working conditions, the people marching and yelling “Zindabad workers’ rights!” under a unionized banner. As I picked up my half-eaten bucket of blueber-ries,
I turned to my sisters and repeated what I heard on the tv, that this was no place for children. I knew I would never go back.

My mother narrowed her eyes as I opened and closed the fridge looking for something to eat.

“If you are so hungry, why don’t you finish your lunch?” she said, interrupting her phone conversation to throw my lunch bag at me. I hated the way she juggled two conversations at once. It made everything she said sound frustrated and disjointed. I never knew if her anger was meant for me or if it reflected the other half of the conversation she was carrying on. I sat at the table and pulled out the half-eaten peanut butter sandwich. My mother placed tea in front of me and I dipped the sandwich in, trying to make the filling taste like something other than peanut butter.

She put the phone down and looked out the window. “You were walking with that boy again.” She still sounded angry, but the very nature of the Punjabi language was terse.

“Relax, Mom, he’s just a friend.”

“Speak in Punjabi, Meena! Friend shmend,” she mocked before retreating back to Punjabi. “He is a boy, a white boy! What will people think when they see you walking with a boy? They will think that he is a boyfriend
.
The last thing you need is to hurt your reputation, hurt your chances of making a good match, or worse, your sister’s. I won’t have you wandering the streets like a dog.

“Mom, I don’t wander the streets like a dog; I was just walking home.” She uttered a prayer, the same prayer she used for everything, but this time I was sure she meant for God to bring us all suitable husbands and to free her of her maternal obligations. It calmed her only momentarily. “You do not need friends,” she continued. “You have sisters to be your friends. I do not send you to school to make friends. You should go to school, study and come home. None of this friends business. Now tie up your hair!” She attempted to pull it back, to tame it furiously in one orderly braid. “What is this?” she asked, picking at the blossoms between strands. I pushed her away. She released the half braid and sat next to me, her frustration wedged
between us. I sat still, gazing into my tea, wishing it hadn’t rained, wishing she hadn’t come home early.

The back door opened and slammed shut. The china that had never seen a happy occasion quivered in the glass cabinet, reverberating an entrance through the wood-panelled walls.

“Hello!” came a voice, as footsteps ran up the stairs towards us.

It was Serena, my oldest, smartest, married sister. She had spiral permed hair and had given birth to a healthy baby boy, ending the daughter curse that had plagued my mother for twenty-eight years. Serena, who wore inexpensive drugstore perfume and bought my mother candied ginger and pastel-coloured chocolate mints, saved me from my mother’s lecture.

“Hi,” I muttered, breezing by her on the way to my room. I suppressed the urge to slam my bedroom door; my mother hadn’t allowed closed doors since Harj left.
“
Families do not need privacy,” she insisted. “In India a family of ten can live in one room and never argue.” I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling, searching for patterns in the stucco as I listened to my sister and mother’s conversation float down the hall from the kitchen.

“What’s wrong with her?” Serena asked my mother.

“I knew we should never have let her go to high school dances.”

I heard my mother get up from the chair, to make chai no doubt; tea companioned all events, soothed every emotion.

“Mom, a dance never hurt anyone.”

“She’s never happy; she mopes around all day, her head in silly books and now I just saw her walking home with
that
white boy. Is that what it takes to make her smile?” I flinched at the hostility in her voice. “She is too much like Harjinder.”

“Mom, just because Harj left doesn’t mean she will. Give Meena some space. It’s been hard for her.”

“Hard for her? What about me? I am the one who cries for Harjinder, I am the one who wonders where my daughter is, what she is doing, who she is with. She is out there, somewhere, living like a gora, pretending that she is one of them. I don’t want that for Meena.” I sat up, listening more atten-tively when I heard Harj’s name mentioned alongside mine. “Sometimes I think I should send her back to England to live with her sister, or maybe
India this time? She could learn to cook, learn some respect and usefulness. Indian girls in England are still Indian. She could learn something.”

“Mom, you can’t send her away again. It won’t do any good.”

“Why not? It did her some good the first time. When she came back she was respectful, even spoke Punjabi.”

“Yes, you’re right, she was different, she is different; she’s not Harj and you can’t keep treating her like she’s the one who ran away. Look, I’ll go talk to her.”

I put my headphones on and opened up a notebook, scribbling in the side margins when I heard Serena walk down the hall towards my room.

She sat on the edge of my bed, pulled my headphones offand held them to her ear. “What are you listening to?”

“New Order.”

Serena got up, walking around my room, studying the walls covered in
Rolling Stone
,
Vogue
and
Elle
magazine covers. “Wow. Mom never let me put anything like this up in my room. But then again, I never thought to ask.”

The only thing that Serena had on her bedroom walls when she was my age was some pictures of ducks that she’d painted. I thought she was an artist until I realized they were from a paint-by-numbers kit. She sat down again, picking up my Walkman, turning it around in her hands. “Harj was so excited when I bought this for her. She wore it everywhere. You remember that time she even wore it to the gurdwara, with the headphones hidden under her chunni?”

I nodded, half laughing. “That was classic.”

“I was so worried that Mom would find out that I sat so she couldn’t see Harj.” Serena looked away, negotiating the silence. “What are you writing?”

I put the notebook down. “Stuff.”

“New poems?”

“Yeah. I’ve been reading a lot of Neruda lately and–”

“That’s good. It’s important to have a hobby.”

“It’s more than a hobby.” I pulled a university application out of my backpack, showing her the creative writing program in Toronto that I wanted to apply for.

“Oh Meena… You know how Mom feels about that. It’s been hard for her since Harj left. Don’t make things harder for her.”

“I’m not.”

“I know. I know you’re not. But she worries and, well, with Harj gone…”She paused. “Things are
different
… I know it’s hard, we all miss her, but she made her choices and we’re all living with them. For you part of that is doing what Mom wants you to—unless you want to go back to England?”

I pulled my knees into my chest. “And when do I get to do what I want?”

“When you get married.”

“When I’m married? Then I’ll just be someone else’s daughter and someone’s wife. When will I get to be who
I
am?”

“This is who you are.” She touched my shoulder in an attempt at affection before leaving to answer our mother’s call to tea.

I lay on my bed thinking about Harj. Two years ago I’d come home from school to find Tej crying. When I’d asked her what was wrong, she handed me the note that she’d found on the coffee table. I’d said good-bye to Harj before I left for school; she told me to have a good day. I tried to think if she’d said it differently than she usually did. Should I have known by her tone that I wasn’t going to see her again? But I wasn’t paying attention. It was just another day that I was wishing away. At times, I thought it would have been easier for my mother if Harj were dead. There was no betrayal in that type of loss; it was acceptable, even manageable.

The year that Harj left, my mother sent me to England for the summer to stay with my sister Parm and her new husband. After a week, I realized my vacation was an intervention; I was sent there to learn how to be good. I spent that summer vacation wearing a salwar kameez, mouthing prayers from the
Guru Granth Sahib
and learning how to make roti. I passed my days with chores and between tea time and supper would retreat to the solarium while Parm sat in the front room, tuned into the much-loved Australian soap opera
Neighbours.
Oddly, it was during an episode of
Neighbours
that I met Ranjit, who lived next door in an identical red brick house. His mother had sent him over to get some spinach from our garden so she could make fresh saag paneer for dinner.

He was two years older than me and, despite a very religious and traditional Sikh appearance, turned out to be pretty cool. He wore Pepe jeans and khakis before they were common and had a cd player even though stores were still selling records. He was passionate about the hybrid of hip hop and house music, claiming that it gave the world a sound to match the technological revolution. He was sure that Macintosh and ms-dos would change how we experienced life, so he studied computer programming while living within the confines of our cultural programming. We were a lot alike. He wore a turban to please his mother and I was trying to learn how to make a round roti to please mine. On the days that Parm and her husband were at work, Ranjit and I would sneak away and take the Under-ground into London to explore the world that we were not supposed to be part of.

Two days before I was to return to Canada we were on the train, on our way back home, when he suddenly asked me if I would ever marry someone with a turban. His eyes were as intense as the silence that followed. I didn’t want to tell him no; I didn’t want to tell him yes. I sat for a moment, wavering between reason and emotion, swaying with the movements of the train.

“No, I could never marry someone who was so religious and traditional,” I told him.

“Yeah, but you can look the part and not be, you know?” “No, I don’t know.”

That was the last time we spoke.

1.3

M
r. Peters looked up from the blackboard just as I was attempting to slip into English class undetected. He put his chalk down and wiped the dust on his denim pants before adjusting the waistband. He was the kind of man who apparently didn’t realize that over the years his stocky build had turned to fat rolls that were slopping over his belt, pushing his jeans to new lows, causing shirt buttons to pull and seams to show their toothy grimace.

“To be in class or not to be in class, Meena? That is the question.”

I caved into the desk in front of Liam’s. “To be.”

“And?”

“But I was only a minute late.”

I sighed and waited for him to hand me my poetic punishment. Liam leaned forward, his breath in my ear, and whispered, “How about Lord Byron?” Mr. Peters slapped his ruler on the desk. He was a former rugby player who often used his class as a captive audience for the stories of his glory days. Worse were his poetic indiscretions; at the end of Grade 11 he had written in almost every girl’s annual: “She walks in beauty like the night, of cloudless climbs and starry skies, And all that’s best of light and dark meet in her aspect and her eyes.” Although I thought his licence in messing with genious was perverse, I felt slighted when he scrawled only “Have a good summer” in mine. Shortly after, I decided that there
was nothing he could teach me that I couldn’t learn on my own so I began skipping every other class and had continued to do so this year. Whenever I actually showed up, Mr. Peters went to great lengths to single me out with his condescending tones and Shakespearean theatrics.

“To be, or not to be,” he repeated, handing me my essay on Hamlet, frowning despite the a+ that was scrawled and circled at the top. I wasn’t sure whether it was my lack of participation and attendance that offended him or whether it was the fact that despite the lack of either, I still had the best mark in the class. “We’re waiting,” he said, returning to the front of the classroom.