Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (26 page)

In Anta’s presence a short while ago I had found myself thinking of Zain. Lying next to Anta on the bed, I had wanted to tell her about Sid and me, about Sid and Zain. I hadn’t done so, but I suspected that one day soon I would. She wouldn’t stay the night, naturally, but when we kissed against the door of her car I felt as if I had already, long ago and numerous times, made love to her.

I thought about Rosita and Lancelot and the tall woman, Kareen Akal Sharma, and how when they’d left the room and closed the door, they had done so knowing full well that Anta was in there with me. The conservatism that supposedly pervaded Trinidad seemed to have momentarily dissipated. It had indeed been a strange night. I had come face to face with women and men who presented themselves in ways that did not match their voices and their bodies—and yet, at the end of the night I was left with no sense that lies had been told. No secrets had been imposed on anyone. Everything was out in the open. And this house had clearly been, to these people, a safe place. This, one of the nights of Sydney’s wake, had in an odd way been one of the best I had ever spent in Trinidad.

I found myself wondering if Zain had been anything like Anta. As strange as it might seem, I felt an impossible desire now to know who Zain really was.

I went inside and undressed and planted myself at my desk. I retrieved my own notebook and began again—this time taking Zain’s voice, hesitantly at first, but then in comfortable stride.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with that passage, so I worked on another, trying again to capture Zain—her voice and cadences as they’d been in the letters I’d read.

———

Anta telephoned the next morning during breakfast, and I had to take the call in the kitchen, where there was no privacy. However much I had marvelled last night at the atmosphere of openness and truth-telling, I was unable to carry that higher state of mind, that ennobled life-condition, into the new day, and I felt unusually self-conscious knowing that Carmen, Lancelot and Rosita—who had answered the phone—were all in earshot. They would surely be able to tell from the sound of my voice that I had cherished the feel of Anta’s steady hand beneath my head, the smell of her skin, the taste of her mouth.

But I needn’t have worried. As if nothing had passed between us, Anta said that she called to make sure that the
kurta
and pants fitted. I had not yet tried on the suit, and she reminded me, although I needed no such prodding, that the funeral was the following morning. I ended the call easily, knowing that I would speak with her again after trying on the clothing.

Two flower arrangements soon arrived. No one knew the names on the cards that accompanied them. Rosita hovered about the dining room as I finished eating, and I imagined she wanted to reassure me about my falling apart last night. She followed me when I went out onto the veranda. Before I could turn to her, she began to deliver a lecture: “Those people. They all go to Baphomet where Mr. Sydney used to have to go to. He was the oldest one, and the first to do it. Those people were his friends. They were his family. People might be uncomfortable with how they are, but
they
were his family too.”

I felt the heat of blood rising in my face.

“Just some months ago,” she continued, “they wanted to pay him a tribute, and they say they was going to name a fund at the clinic,
Sydney Mahale Priority Fund
. Why Mr. Sydney go and tell Miss Gita, I don’t know. I suppose it was because he was so proud. But she did vex-vex, too-bad-too-bad, for when she hear the family name was going to be used like that she say, No! Not over she dead body. So, just like that he back down. He didn’t even bother to fight she. He just go back to them and he tell them, quiet so, thanks, but no thanks, not to do it.”

I should perhaps have been gentler in my response, for Rosita had not been privy to my process throughout the evening before of opening my eyes and mind; she had only seen my intense discomfort. In any case, had she so accepted Sydney—she who washed his clothing, and she and Lancelot who bathed him and changed his clothes, and administered his medications and injections when he himself no longer could, and surely knew who and what he was then, and what he had been in the past—had she so accepted him that she hadn’t seen my struggle to do so? Moreover, I was startled by the presumption of the kind of relationship between her and me that would allow her to speak with me, or rather
to
me, in such a manner. “I appreciate you clarifying that,” I said, perhaps too tersely, and headed towards the garden wall that overlooked the Gulf. As I walked, I wondered if she had ever had cause to speak with Sydney in such a manner. Perhaps it ought to be permitted at times?

I returned to the house and in a softer manner asked her if she had everything she needed for the day. Her manner was gentler too, when she replied that she had everything, and added that Carmen’s daughter would be joining to help with the cooking and cleaning. I saw no reason for this, save for the delight of fuss and chaos the occasion of a death here offered, but of course, I made no objection.

The shirt and the pants were of a startling white colour, their fabric as light and soft as that used to swaddle a newborn baby. I tried them on—the first time I had ever worn anything Indian, even though
kurtas
were not unfamiliar to me. I thought of Sydney. Of Sid. I heard Rosita’s words, spoken numerous times since his death, that he was right here, watching over and seeing everything. I had dismissed these words as merely typical of Rosita’s ways of thinking, but here I was, imagining that he was indeed watching, that he saw I was preparing to carry out my duties at his funeral.

When I telephoned Anta to report that the
kurta
fitted me, she asked what the day had in store for me. I told her that I had to return to the funeral home to approve of Sydney’s appearance. It would be a stressful morning, she commiserated; would I be interested in doing something that offered a respite, if only briefly, from all that was going on? I accepted her offer to meet at a café in Port of Spain. She would take me from there on a short relaxing hike up to a nearby waterfall. As I put down the phone I could not
tell which was greater: my desire to see her, or my nervousness over returning to the funeral home and the prospect of seeing Sydney again.

Just before entering the cold room where Sydney lay, I mused how, in Canada, I had never heard of anyone doing this kind of thing. I wondered if seeing the body of the deceased was a more natural way of being, a healthier attitude towards the dead and death, or part of a backward way of life.

As it turned out, Sydney in death looked remarkably as he had in life. If it were not for the frills in the interior of the coffin, how its cushioned walls hugged his body tightly, and how straight he was arranged, I would have thought he was lying in a strange bed, merely asleep.

The mortician allowed me some minutes with Sydney, and the question I had arrived with was answered in part when I gave in to a surprising and urgent desire to touch Sydney’s face. Although I had expected it to be cold, I was startled. The surface of the skin seemed soft until I let my hand rest too heavily, and I felt beneath it a sobering hardness. He looked so much like himself, but the one expression on his face, while certainly his, was all that there was. I was in the room alone with him for no more than three minutes, but it was long enough for me to believe that his soul had, as Pundit had told me, flown away and this was what had been left behind. Still, I rested my hand lightly on the cheek of the face of that body, and felt regret that I had
not been physically closer to Sydney in the last years of his life. I felt, too, humbled by this opportunity here in Trinidad to take care of him one last time.

Back at the house, as I packed a bag with my swimming trunks and a towel, I naturally thought of Catherine. I felt some guilt—not because I was about to head off to meet Anta, but for having held on to Catherine. I knew in my bones that our relationship had, for both of us, ended. The guilt was so strong that I gave in and phoned her. Thankfully, she did not answer her land line or her cellphone. I did not leave messages on either.

Anta was an only child, she told me as we went around the Queen’s Park Savannah. She was the daughter
and
the son her mother had wanted, and she was the daughter and the son her father had wanted too. This wasn’t my first time around the Savannah, but Anta drove slowly and pointed out the colonial buildings that were now used as government offices, and the island’s two most prestigious boys’ secondary schools, Saint Mary’s College and Queen’s Royal College, the former looking like a monastery, the latter like a grandiose German Renaissance facsimile. In some ways, it
was
the first time I was seeing them.

Her time was clearly her own and I wondered aloud if she had a job or profession. She explained that she had an undergraduate degree in music, and on afternoons she gave private lessons on the harmonium and the sitar. She
sang, too, and played these instruments at her father’s temple.

Her family, I learned, was an odd mix of Indian and Hindu tradition and modernism. Her father, she told me, used to provoke discussion with her and goad her on to disagree with him, taking one side of an argument one day and quite the opposite the next. He no longer did this, for now they knew each other so well that they anticipated too quickly what argument each had waiting. When she did something that displeased him and her mother, she was made to choose her own punishment, one that was appropriate, neither lenient nor exaggerated, and she was made to defend the choice of punishment rather than to dwell directly on her infractions.

Pundit used the excuse nowadays of his cataracts for asking her to drive him about, but he had begun to teach her to drive when she was ten years old and had to sit on cushions so that she could see above the steering wheel. She remembered, she told me, at age fourteen driving him one night to a neighbour’s house. The place was not too far away, but it was illegal and dangerous for her to drive all the same. Her father had taken her with him everywhere he went when she was a child, much to many people’s dismay, but those people came, in time, to regard her with the respect they would have given her brother, had she one. If those people had daughters he would preach directly to the daughters, sometimes to the amusement, but more regularly to the chagrin, of the girls’ relatives, pointing out his own Anta, saying that if she could do all of these things
herself—if she could study and come in the first three in her class, if she could build and decorate a
bedi
, if she could rub her father’s and mother’s legs with sesame oil, if she could go to the shop for her mother and tell any wayward young men who had words for her along the way what was good for them without swearing or disrespecting herself, if she could climb a mango tree and bring down the chicken from it—if she could do all of this and still be the daughter any parent could want, including a pundit, then they, too, should be able to do these things. Nowadays, she gave her mother a rest by doing the driving that, on account of the cataracts, her father could no longer do, and she read the newspapers and magazines to him. There was little time for a social life, she told me, but she liked it that way.