When She Was Queen (14 page)

His was the kind of pompous, authoritarian voice that prompts one to rebel. What did the man know of the right path except that it was the official path, I caught myself asking, echoing Bharwani perhaps.

“It’s his wife’s and children’s desire to fulfill his wish,” I said.

“Then obviously they are misled. You can convince them as to what is right, can’t you? If not, I’ll give them a call myself.”

He didn’t wait, though, for twenty minutes later, while I prevaricated and sounded out Farida on what to do, Yasmin called.

“Mukhisaheb, the Chairman himself called. There doesn’t seem much choice now….” Her voice petered out.

All she wanted was to be told what was right. The Chairman had done that, but she wanted to hear it from me. At that moment I made up my mind.

“Listen, Yasmin,” I told her. “You and the children should decide for yourself. I can’t advise you what to do. But the funeral ceremony will happen tomorrow. It’s up to you and your children whether you choose to bury or cremate their father.”

She took a long moment before saying, “All right.”

Emil called that evening, and we talked for a while. Then Zuleikha called and said, “Thank you, Mukhisaheb. I know my father was right to depend on you.” She added, just before hanging up: “You know what? Some of my uncles have found out about this, and may try to stop us. But we are ready. The law is on our side, isn’t it?”

“I believe so,” I answered, having checked with my legal expert Jamal in the meantime.

“If your conscience wills it that way,” was Farida’s response to my decision. Bharwani’s desire to be cremated had appalled her, actually; she saw it as mischievous and divisive. But she, if anyone, knew that my resolution had not been an easy one to arrive at; and we both were too aware that the final outcome tomorrow was far from certain, and repercussions in the days ahead would yet have to be faced.

Laid out before me and my associate performing the funeral rites, Bharwani looked a meagre, helpless rendition of his old self in the funeral casket. In small groups selected members of the congregation came and knelt before him, on his other side, and went through the ritual in which the dead is forgiven of sins. Earlier on I had spotted Iqbal and gone to give him a comforting pat on the shoulder. I had developed a possessive, protective instinct
for him. We stood together, and when I went to take my place for the ceremonies he came and sat down beside me on the carpet, watching people come and kneel before his dead father.

Yasmin was wearing a white shalwar kameez, a dupatta covering her head—a mode of dressing that was never traditionally ours but, ironically, has been recently acquired in Canada. Beside her sat her mother-in-law pulling at her beads frantically, her head lowered, and the sisters-in-law. Bharwani’s two brothers and other male relations sat grimly in a large group directly in front of me, ready for battle; somewhat to the side and quite distinct from them sat Emil with a few young men. It took me a while to find Zuleikha, also sitting away from her family.

The ceremony over, I stood up, motioning for the casket to be left as it was, and made a short speech. I said that our brother Karim Bharwani had made his wish known at his death bed that he wanted to be cremated. Karim, who was a classmate of mine, was a deep-thinking and not frivolous man. I had been told that his wife and children wished to respect our dead brother’s last wish. Whatever our own beliefs were, we should open our hearts and respect their decision.

I motioned to the funeral committee to pick up the coffin and begin the chant, so that the male family members and congregation could carry it away. The women of the family began to weep.

“We do not cremate our dead, it is a sin!” boomed a deep voice from the back of the hall. It was the Chairman.

For moments nothing moved, there came only the moaning, sobbing sounds of the women. I was the person
officially in charge, and the weight of all stares was upon me. I nodded to Emil, whereupon he and two hefty friends stepped forward to lift the casket. They gathered at the front end, somewhat nervously awaiting reinforcements, when promptly the dead man’s brothers and a third man came and took hold of the back. The coffin was raised—and there ensued a tug-of-war.

At first, equal forces applied from the front and the back, the coffin hung still. Then it lurched forward, where the greater strength of the younger men lay. But these boys relaxed their hold and a sudden pull came from behind, where two large women had now joined forces. A fair crowd had gathered and was pulling aggressively at the back, having sensed victory for that side, ready to hand it charge—but two or three of those at the very back tripped and fell, bringing their end of the coffin with them. Poor Bharwani, after being buffeted this way and that in his box, was brought to rest at a forty-five-degree angle.

There was stunned silence, and then the eerily thin quivering sound of a snicker that turned heads. It was Yasmin, caught in a hysterical fit. Tears streamed down her face as she laughed, Zuleikha holding on to her shoulders. The women around them had moved away in fear.

In disgust I turned to Bharwani’s relations: “Is this what you wish for him, this circus? To what holy end?”

Shamefaced, they retreated from the coffin, which was brought back to rest on the floor. Then Jamal, Nanji, and the rest of the classmates at one end, and Emil and two pals in front, unescorted by anyone else, the coffin bearing Bharwani slowly made its way to the door, outside
which two hearses awaited to carry the dead to either of the two arrangements which had been made for him.

Bharwani, you won, I muttered, as I closed the door of my car on Iqbal, who was accompanying me to the crematorium. There were four cars in the procession that left the mosque, far fewer than would normally have accompanied the cortège, and our escorting policemen sped us through the traffic in no time.

My new friend Iqbal was chatty in the car. “When a person dies, he leaves the body, isn’t that so? So the body is just flesh, and even begins to smell and rot.”

I nodded. “Yes. That’s why we have to bury it or … cremate it, as soon as possible.” Or leave it exposed for vultures to eat, I said to myself.

“My dad is alive somewhere, I know.”

“I know that too.”

Is it still October, he asks,
turning around wide-eyed and apprehensive, as if the month passed while he was trying to sleep.

Yes, my dear, it’s still October, I say to him in the dark.

And so it will remain for you, always, and for me; and many of your friends will not see much of the new month either.

What a bore, this Halloween that’s now over. And it’s
not because I wasn’t born here, didn’t have
trick-or-treat!
as a kid: where is the
passion
in this festival, I ask you? It’s all mechanical, merely
duty
. Six p.m., the toddlers are the first to arrive at the door, the cute angels pushed forward by an anxious parent; seven, the pirates and witches come, and at eight a few teenage louts in garish rubber masks, with pounding footsteps and heavy breathless voices, loaded with garbage bags containing candies. Six in the morning the next day, tomorrow, the pumpkin chucked out in the garbage. Business as usual, all’s forgotten, and on to another theme, in this ongoing conspiracy between shopkeepers who’ll sell a condom to your grandfather and teachers devoted to work-free “theme” days. And the
tons
of candies in this tight-assed Frigidaire of a community best characterized by a certain insect with a sting. A clear half of the sweets is dumped out with the pumpkin, at least in this household. That’s dollars and cents sacrificed in the name of neighbourhood relations, much good that’s done. And what do those tooth-sharpeners the dentists say about this candy madness?—nothing, simply rub their hands in glee, seeing the down payment on the Jag or that Cessna….
Who wants gum?
—
I do, I do…
.

Ouch, the tooth hurts, but damn if I’ll go to one of those rapacious drillers—not now, anyway. Live with the pain, die with the pain.

Poisons and painkillers. A poison is a painkiller, ultimate. And the weapon of a thinker, a schemer, as opposed to a gun. Like chess is to football. Like a certain nitrosamine compound. Tasteless, odourless, with cousins abiding
safely in your homely and much maligned spinach; or adding zap to jet fuel. The wonders of chemistry. (The wonders of poison.) Replace one radical in your vegetable extract with another and you make yourself a first-class killer, cooler than a Beretta. Satanic, spreadable. Have death, will travel. That’s all it takes to make a killer—a small change, an emendation. Inject a smidgin in the bloodstream and all the elaborate machinery of evolution, this pinnacle of organized matter, this genius of chemistry and electric impulses, comes to naught. Unrevivable. Biodegradable. Slime into dust, worms into flesh. Fertilizer. But suppose this elaborate circuitry, these electric impulses, can be revived, memory and all? Then God will not exist, for there will be no one to answer to. And killing will have to be more thorough. But that’s too far away, today and tomorrow bodies will decompose.

In my mind’s eye I hear a scream; if I let this mind tarry, then a blood-curdling scream, yes. I feel grief, a bit, a residue, deep somewhere—who wouldn’t?—but most of me stays cold. Because I have crossed over, to the evil, the satanic; the painless. I know there is no good or evil. There is only possibility and experience, there is curiosity and numbness; bitterness, anger, calmness, vindication; and bemusement, we all have to face death, it comes unannounced, knows no night or day, child or adult, coldly plucks out its appointed victim—isn’t that what we were always told? And—if you ever believed it—we all live out our appointed share of life. I never did believe that, even as a child in a religious household. But this much I know, to the dying, death comes without notice. And this case, at least,
this
present case evolving
even now as I think these thoughts sitting on the floor beside my angel’s bed, will be without violation of the purity of innocents, will be truly nonviolent in the most important way.

There are two kinds of poison—those that strike the nervous system, and those the circulatory system. So said my first snake book.
Snakes? Ur-rurr!
Who would want to study snakes, the devil’s own creation, coldblooded terror slithering silently underfoot … well, what’s wrong with finding out? Most snakes are, well, nonviolent, and those who can will hurt you when frightened. I got interested in them because of what I’d heard. The chhatu—python—so big and powerful, just by opening its mouth and drawing breath it could pull in and ingest a dog at, say, twenty feet. And the cobra, my mother would say, the black naag who if you kill its mate will follow you to the end of the earth and seek revenge in your veins—and so the fate of a man who had been followed by a she-cobra all the way from India to Africa, over the black waters. A story to make you shudder and dream in terror afterwards. And then of course, still talking snakes and poisons, Elizabeth Taylor—Cleopatra—and the viper, oh what tenderness toward a snake, what dignity to death. And Eve and the serpent. On thy belly shalt thou crawl, but the snake had the last laugh, spine-shaped, hairlike, penislike, smiling its toothless smile that sends shudders down the … well, spine.

But mother didn’t talk about scorpions—except how one got into one of her cousin’s ears. Nothing about how
the female stings and kills its mate after mating…. Does the male scorpion actually find the female beautiful?

How tenderly beautiful did my little arachnid look, once upon a wedding night in Karachi, delicate and fragile, her face pink and rouged, lips red and full, puckered Madhuri-like, white sari sequinned, the end going over the black hair.
O piece of the moon
, my heart sang, she was full and ripe, ready to be plucked—
fucked
—and I did just that. I drew blood. Only, she took two decades and four kids before she stung back, this pro-lifer, drew all the money from our accounts and fled with Pious Ayub. And left me with this freak. Nature’s chromosomically slight deviation from the template labelled “normal.”

Freak, but how tender and human, how loving he can be … when those fragile arms go around the neck and he clings, and how sensitive to hurt, and what a laugh and mischief, what embodiment of life. As if sensing I was the one who would have terminated his gestation, he’s reserved his devotion for me. And his mother, who had insisted on having him, finally abandoned him to me and absconded.

Yes, it’s still October, my angel, but just…. How you tug at my heart, how I wish you had had a semblance even of normalcy in your life—a reasonably happy home, McDonald’s and Gerrard Street and Wonderland, Centre Island, monopoly and cards, and baseball, and holidays out of town. But for you it was wrong from the word go; and you yourself didn’t add up.

Child, child…
.

The last of the teenage louts stomp away from the front door disappointed, dragging their sacks full of
goodies. The jack-o’-lantern on the porch has flickered out. A fat but not full moon slides through wispy clouds this cold night. The last of the maple leaves hang limply from their trees. The quiet houses of this lovely, traditional street exude cosy warmth through their windows.

Yes, a beautiful street of old English-style red-brick houses with sloping roofs and bay windows, hung over with grizzled maples. As in the storybooks; you should see it after a snowfall.
She
would have preferred
new!-new!–new!
and faraway, closer to the North Pole, a dream mansion in a brand-new development, with houses six deep and saplings planted on the sidewalks hopefully to give shade in two decades, by which time the area would be overrun by neo-Nazis, Jamaican warlords, and the Russian mafia. She didn’t object past the first demurral—there’s status to living in an all-white neighbourhood, provided you don’t let on about the unnerving experiences. Those little slights that are almost not there; but they are. Soon after we moved in, as we unloaded groceries in the driveway, a guy walked past saying, How did
you
find yourselves here? Same way as you, sucker, I shouted back, we’re here and we’re taking over. Fat chance, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say just that. Meanwhile our three were the only brown kids in school, besides one black and one half-Japanese. Try that for comfort. Try telling the kids they’re not white, not better than black nor worse than anyone else. And the neighbours, a reserved kind, the stiff-upper-lip sort—at least as far as we’re concerned; because when a white couple moved in three months after us, the whole street came up to shake hands with them and kiss their
blue-eyed angels, these Ontarian patriots come to defend the Anglo fort. But so what? These enclaves have to be broken in, neutralized,
multiculturalized
. That argument is similar to the one I used for bringing into our home a Christmas tree: let’s make the tree
ours!
She wouldn’t have it. But what do we have that’s so festive? I demanded. We have Eid, but what fun is it anymore? Christmas is in the
air
we breathe, as once Eid and Diwali were. Let’s move then, she insisted, to somewhere where we have people and can celebrate our festivities. No. No, no, no! Give satisfaction to these stuck-up prigs, these escapees from 1776, and freedom, these British-but-Americans? Give satisfaction to
him
, the single-handed destroyer of my career?… upon whom, however, the angel of death is moving in, as he did against the Egyptians….