WRITING FICTION, READING THEORY: A SELF-REFLECTIVE EXPLORATION OF HOW AND

WHY I WRITE FICTION, AND THE ROLE OF POLITICS AND THEORY THEREIN

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

of

The University of Guelph

by

SHANI MOOTOO

In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

September, 2010

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1+1 Canada ABSTRACT

WRITING FICTION, READING THEORY: A SELF-REFLECTIVE EXPLORATION OF HOW AND WHY I WRITE FICTION, AND THE ROLE OF POLITICS AND THEORY THEREIN

Shani Mootoo Advisor: University of Guelph, 2010 Dr. Smaro Kamboureli

Writing Fiction, Reading Theory is this thesis author's investigation into her creative process of fiction writing. Using contemporary political and social theory to illuminate the practice of writing, this thesis proposes and examines multiple rationales for aesthetic and political choices inherent in the various elements of the writing process. The writer utilizes theoretical work, such as Edward Said's discussion of the responsibility of the intellectual and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari' s notions of the rhizome and assemblage to understand the impetus to write, the methods, and the kinds of issues she chooses to address in her work. This understanding allows and leads to an aesthetic and political validation ofboth impetus and method, as well as the resonances that simultaneously mirror what the writer attempts to say in her work and push beyond a merely theoretical understanding to a moment of creativity that remains ineffable. Acknowledgements

Great appreciation is owed to Ashok Mathur and Smaro Kamboureli for encouraging me to turn my dream of doing the Masters Degree in English into a reality.

During the course of the year spent working on the Degree at the University of Guelph, several people helped smooth the way. In particular I would like to mention Zaphura Chan, Sarah Declerck, Faye Guenther, and Ramesh Mootoo (Junior).

I thoroughly enjoyed studying alongside my fellow students in the Department of English and Theatre Studies and want to thank them for an excellent graduate-student experience.

My program could not have happened were it not for the generosity and direction of Mark Fortier, Danny O'Quinn, and Sharon Ballantyne. Thank you, too, to Christine Bold, Elaine Chang, and Sky Gilbert for their instruction over the course of the year and in whose classes, unknown to them even, threads of this thesis were woven.

Thank you to the University of Guelph for funding in large part my tenure as a student, through teaching assistantships and bursaries.

Not least of all I wish to thank my thesis supervisor Smaro Kamboureli for her guidance and very welcome, and unparalleled, intellect and rigour, committee member Dionne Brand, and the committee advisor chair Janice Kulyk Keefer.

Behind it all, always, are Indra and Romesh Mootoo. Thank you, Mummy and Daddy, for your gentle, steady hand at my back.

Finally, my deepest thanks go to my first reader Deborah Root who introduced me to Deleuze and Guattari, talked theory with me endlessly, made the coffee and walked the dogs so that I could read and write.

i Table of Contents

Reading Theory: A Self-reflective Exploration of How and Why I Write Fiction, and the Role of Politics and Theory Therein 1

Writing Fiction: Moving Forward Sideways 22

Works Cited 106

Il Reading Theory: A Self-reflective Exploration of How and Why I Write Fiction, and the Role of Politics and Theory Therein.

1 A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation ... of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc—and an abstract machine that sweeps

them along?

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 4)

An assemblage is [an] increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as

those found in a structure, tree, or root.

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 8)

It is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces.

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 14)

An essay that offers a theoretical analysis of one's own novel might appear to be oxymoronic, its writer a body with two heads, one that hovers on the edge of existence by constantly resisting interpretation, the other dependent on interpretation. The two are at odds with each other, the creative part a chameleon inventing and reinventing itself in response, even resistance, to the other that appraises, interprets, and analyses. The critic in a constant game of catch-up with its perpetually altering alter-image. The result might well be cacophonous—but we have long ago become accustomed to the musical potential in discord. The writing of this essay, as is also the case with its subject matter and that of the work it analyzes, operates as a rhizomatic network in a machine within a machine, in which other machines operate, all at once surveying, mapping, dreaming, desiring. If Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 's machine derives from a notion of assemblage—a synthesis of disparate elements ( Deleuze and Guattari 343)- in which some parts fit well and others not, I would like to extend this notion when thinking of the creative process~my own in particular—to imagine that the assemblage, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is always in motion, in flux, is favourable to and encouraging of experimentation. The throbbing and the cacophony are at once orgiastic and resisting the paradigms of heteronormative coupling, resisting the drive to prove anything; instead, they express truths that resonate and contradict. Always, all at the same time.

II

Moving Forward Sideways is the working title of my novel in progress. Because I am the writer of the work I will analyze, it would be disingenuous, if not dishonest, of me to write in a way that is not personal and experiential. In this part of my thesis, I am simultaneously the creative writer-my primary, if not permanent, condition- and my work's critic interpreter, or appraiser. The messiness and interconnectedness of these two-in-one roles, as discussed in this essay, handsomely mirror my larger project as a person in society and as a writer/artist working against the grain. Writing against the grain, against regimes of authority, against heteronormativity in particular, is necessarily multi- valenced and polymorphic. Unidimensional constructs such as queer theory, race, class, and feminist

3 theory have, at times, sought to explain complex social and political phenomena through reference to a single over-determining cause, for instance, "the patriarchy." Such explanations are by definition partial and, I think, crude. For instance, queer theorist—Sally Munt and Judith Halberstam, for instance- has certainly pointed out, in some cases, that aspects of western butch aesthetics and performance of masculinity originate in the Western working class male, but fails to excavate, complicate, and theorize the reasons for this. A more fruitful way of thinking allows for and affirms a multiplicity of influences as exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the rhizome or root vegetable—different from the taproot- that sends up shoots without a readily recognizable pattern, or logic. Such thinking, such a rhizomatic approach, allows for multiple points of entry, causes, influences, and exits. When, for example, race is understood in terms of class and gender our conception of how race actually functions in society and plays out in peoples' lives is deepened and complicated. If the larger project of my creative work is to undo structures of discursive authority, then these rhizomatic tactics are required in order to open and offer multiple entry points into my creative work. The ebb and flow of, and between, the analytical imperative here and my more instinctual but honed impulse towards creative methods shape the larger project. This is a project in which I am consciously and constantly engaged by way of creating ruptures as entry points into the issues that touch my life deeply, and that are the subject, as well as the raison d'être, of my work and, more specifically here, of the novel at hand.

The task of writing this theoretical analysis to explore some of the issues raised in and around my current novel in progress-an analysis that began after the novel chapters were well underway- started out as a fishing expedition, a net of reading cast to reel in the works ofphilosophers, critics, theorists, and literature writers through whom I might glimpse some kind of sympathetic resonance, or with whom I might be compelled to attempt intellectual battle. At the time that I submitted the proposal for

4 this thesis, I had found in the works of Judith Butler, Edward Said, W. G. Sebald, and Theodore Adorno in conversation with Gyorgy Lukacs such glimpses and compulsions that I willfully mistook—a willingness provoked by the finite amount of time available for writing and presenting the thesis proposal—to be in conversation with my own novel writing. Thanks to this Masters Program, I have been able to enter more deeply and systematically than I had done in the past into the works of a good number of philosophers and theorists; still, this process has been barely an introduction- an introduction to the end of my life, even if every day ofthat process was spent in the study of the same. Considering that no work exists in a vacuum, that all works are products of and dependent on works before them, at the side of them, and even after them, on the specific and often unrevealed provocations that light fires under their writers, and on the contextual agendas of local and global time and space of their conception, it is beyond foolhardy, indeed it is dishonest, for someone at my stage of study to assume to "know" anyone else's work. What's more, this would have been my sense even if I had gone through the usual paces and had eventually (and miraculously) been heralded as an expert in the work of a particular philosopher or an area of philosophy. The recognition and admission of this evidently obvious situation is necessary as it underlies the raison d'être of not merely my writing process, but my creative process as a whole, a process that involves casting nets in order to fetch seemingly unrelated jetsam and flotsam that allow me not only to discover what I didn't know was there to be discovered, but to write by baiting the fish and fishing the bait- and doing so meshing messily, queerly- on the outside of the kind of writing that is applauded by the structures of state apparatuses. I say "seemingly" because I am the common denominator in relationship to what is caught and, bringing my own socio-sexual-racio-political specificities to the reasoning behind the associations, the one who chooses and makes the links between the disparate netted dross.

Ill

5 An historical inquiry into why a Trinidadian queer child in the early 1970s was drawn to experimentation in art, writing, and music practices, the reading of Kant, Descartes, Rousseau (books on the shelves of her family's library), and the paintings of David Hockney in a country that did not reward cultural practices (arguably with the exception of the performing arts such as calypso singing and the production of carnival bands) which did not readily reflect back easily consumed flatteries of itself, might go a long way toward an explanation of the present day place of her uses of artistic expression to, as Edward Said says, "confront orthodoxy and dogma. . . and. . . to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug" (Said 11). Of course, Said is speaking of a particular kind of intellectual whom he defines as "someone who visibly represents a standpoint of some kind, and someone who makes articulate representations to his or her public despite all sorts ofbarriers" (Said 12). Without entering into debate here about who and what an intellectual is, I would like to accept Said's definition, and to suggest a historical trajectory of occurrences that might have created one particular kind of writer who, in calling herself (for the sake of argument) an intellectual seeks to accept the responsibility of the intellectual as described by C. Wright Mills:

The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity to continually unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications swamp us. These worlds. . . are increasingly geared to the demands of politics. That is why it is in politics that intellectual solidarity and effort must be centered. If the thinker does not relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience. (Mills 229)

6 Mapping truth necessarily involves playing with temporality, with non-linear histories. What comes first? What realizations are the deciding ones? For example, this historical inquiry into the trajectory of the Trinidadian child would show that she had early on sensed the queerness for which she had no name, yet knew she must hide. Brought up by a father who was, and still is, an active politician— once leader of one of the two main political parties, a senator, mayor, etc.- a sense of social responsibility that involves fighting for social justice was instilled early. So was the conflict between the right to exist in one's personal truth and the expectation to conform to the mores and rules of society. An impulse toward creative expression, mixed with a passion for theoretical and analytical understanding of the nature of human behaviour, that sense of social responsibility, and the outsider status of the queer-all these are the foundation of the "individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating, a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions" (Said 1 1). If, as Deleuze and Guattari say, "writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" (4-5), then, the inevitable result ofwriting might be precisely this raising of embarrassing questions, some of which might be social and political, an example of which, specific to this paper, might be: what lacunae exist in a nation or community's self-representation, and what precisely is regulated and made standard in the construction of a "normalized" social identity? Another question might be: why must gender boundaries be policed and enforced in society, which in turn begs the question of the extent to which desires coded as "deviant" are, in a sense, "mainstream," that is, less uncommon than ideology would have it?

7 The child instinctively (instinct being the function of survival here) suspects that the policing of conduct and social practices, of dress, sexual behavior, and the like, would not occur unless it was believed by those who seek to decide such matters that, without such policing, categories of sexuality would slip into unbearable fluidity. But it would take decades of lived experience, reading, writing practice, and art making to be able to speak these proposed answers plainly, and to turn them into the "show, don't tell" of cultural production. Further historical inquiry might partially conclude that the child in question, given to creative expression, will grow into adulthood realizing the economy of resistance possible in the very same tools of escape (another function of survival), creative expression, in particular art making and writing. It is, above all, her lived experience that drives this creative faculty. She would have seen the failure of already existing structures, languages, tools, and methods to mirror her lived knowledge and experience. The word lezzie used as a curse when it is leveled at a classmate who is because of it exiled. The unbearable pleasure in the scent of her high school best (female) friend's sweat, compounded with the frightening awakening, a sudden knowledge, when that friend, by way of a parting greeting, embraces her and their mouths accidentally meet. In that latter moment, interest in any sort of too-close contact with humans of the opposite sex vaporizes, and understanding about the nature of her desire becomes laced with terror for the future of her life.

In high school she reads the short novel A Year in San Fernando, by Michael Anthony, miraculous if only because of the name of her home town in the title, its shameless display on the jacket cover, but more so because previously she had been reading Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and a host of others whose words and images and stories she loves, but whose worlds are not part of her experience and so she can only imagine. And suddenly Michael Anthony is setting down between the covers of a book the life-like, recognizable signposts of a town,

8 Street names, ways of speaking, schedules of daily life that she recognizes. While this is one of the big revelations of her childhood, another one is that she still remains outside of Anthony's picturing of her homeland. But she knows now of the possibility of creating worlds other than the ones she has seen represented in literature, worlds that reflect her lived experience in Trinidad. This child might be, as a result, propelled, as a matter of survival, to invent new and more applicable universes. At university, far away in another country, she is afforded anonymity by the absence of family, and freedom from cultural expectations, and a fuller meaning of the word lesbian enters her consciousness, heady like a too-ripe fruit exploding. Alongside the constantly surprising and life-affirming pleasures therein, she learns the stunning contradiction that when the word is embodied, the very body that gives and gets its meaning through that implicit identity and culture is inevitably subject to violences against it for its mere existence. Finding "communities of like-bodied and like-minded people" within and at the same time outside of society, she becomes aware that such violences are the result of certain social and cultural configurations, and not inherent in embodied identity itself. As Sally Munt writes, citing Pierre Bourdieu: "the body is a kind of mnemonic device upon which culture is habitually inscribed"

(Munt 2).

The fact of this inevitability in the society she inhabits becomes the crux of all future creative impulses, coupled with the belief that this need not be so. In the late 1970s, in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Western Ontario, she is encouraged in experimentation, the new for the sake of the new, art for art's sake- delightful perversities. By the by, in this new land, she learns of class and of racial injustice- precisely because she is no longer protected by her family's position as beyond- or so it seemed- definition or culpability- because she is now, in this new land, subsumed, a subject not even in opposition, almost voiceless. Almost. The social and political voice of her father

9 wells up inside her— although he did not acknowledge gay and lesbian issues then- and braids itself with the training of the impulse toward new ways of expressing, of seeing, of listening, of representing through art making. Since an in-depth inquiry of this autobiographical portrait is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say such a person might very likely eventually write a novel that explores the resulting life of a lesbian who makes what seems to be her own free choice to surgically alter her body so that she presents to the world as a man.

And again, this very personal exploration is deepened and enriched by a reading of theory, in this instance Michel Foucault' s The History ofSexuality, and the perhaps less obvious choice, The Birth of the Clinic, which lays out and historicizes the medicalization of an increasing range of social and psychological experiences, experiences now imagined to be best understood by coteries of "experts." This medicalization of experience abstracts the "symptom" from the complexes of factors that bear upon the patient's life, and offers exclusively medical solutions to what are in fact social problems. So the lesbian's choice is necessarily contingent on far more than her individual free will; she is also acting in response to what society (which includes lesbian community, itself a product of and part of the very society it resists) tells her is possible (and good).

I cannot but face questions regarding the ordering of chickens and eggs when I try and write, as well as "fit," my own theoretical analysis of my novel in progress into or around the works ofphilosophers and theorists. In writing the novel as part of this Masters thesis, am I writing into it aspects of theories and philosophies, or is the novel writing a response~a hand-shake—or a resistance to these? Am I writing the novel and, then, in working out this analytical part, looking for theorists whose work might back up and confirm mine? When teaching creative writing classes at university level (University of Toronto, Ryerson University, University of Alberta), have I not warned the student-writer to hold her analytical, critical eye on a tight leash during her creative writing period as too-early a critical eye, as

10 important and necessary as it might be, during the creative period can seriously compromise her artistic vision with self consciousness and second guessing? What are these compromises one must resist in a two-pronged process such as this, then, that one inevitably makes, as both aspects of the thesis are to be judged in the decision to award a degree or not? Can the writer who is at once her own creative work's theorist and critic truly stand apart and regard her creative work with impartiality? Or, since she is the one whose task is is to analyze and critique the creative work, is she not necessarily- regardless of how much she might attempt impartiality and integrity—in cahoots with the work, not to be trusted, that is, too much of an insider, one and the same, or, indeed, is she rather to be considered highly trustworthy because of this insiderness? All of the above recognize and, and in so doing, plead guilty to the willing tendentiousness of the complicity of subject and object.

IV

The novel, Moving Forward Sideways, is set in present-day Toronto and present-day Trinidad, and deals with the best-friend, but ambiguously platonic, relationship of two women, across time, class, religion, culture, and sexuality. The chapters presented as part of my thesis are the springboard for a more in-depth exploration possible in the longer form of the novel.

The format of the story telling includes two first-person confessional-style narratives that open with Jonathan, a white gay Canadian man, on one of his regular visits to Sydney, a man of Indian origin in Trinidad. Sydney is transgendered. When Jonathan was born his mother and Sydney, then a butch lesbian known as Siddhi, were lovers. The three lived together until Jonathan was about eight years old. Jonathan had bonded with Siddhi- the strangeness of a femaleness and motherliness effervescent in her commingling with her more usual and comfortable female masculinity. Jonathan's own mother, a writer, neglected him for her writing career. We meet Siddhi in the form of Sydney, an old

11 wheelchair-bound man with medical complications directly related to his transgendering, as he tries to explain to Jonathan why he (or, rather, she) left him and his mother so abruptly, why s/he changed her/his gender, and what it has done to him in the present. Sydney's story, told in a manner braided with Jonathan's commentary, and with minimal writing signs that guide the reader as to who is speaking, begins on a winter's morning with Sydney's narrative of "herself' embarking on a walk, two years after leaving Jonathan and his mother, from "her" home on Wascana Avenue in Corktown, Toronto, to St. Michael's hospital. His reflections are told as if to both Jonathan and to Safi Akbarali, Siddhi's high school best friend, and recall, to Jonathan's jealousy, his (her, then) trips to Trinidad from Canada, to visit his (her, then) high school best friend Safi.

Safi was the wife of a wealthy business-man. She was a socialite with every privilege that comes from the power of "marrying up" and that can be bought with money in a place like Trinidad. She had come from a very poor Muslim family that lived on the edge of a cane field in south Trinidad, and married into old money. Siddhhani Maharaj (Siddhi), from a wealthy Hindu Trinidad family, immigrated some twenty years before to Toronto without her family, and lived as an under-employed artist in Toronto. She had been, in those days she recalls to Jonathan, dealing with issues of gender dysphoria, as well as the untranslatability of her class, her class of origin altered by her immigrant status and by her raced otherness in Toronto.

Safi and Siddhi met when Siddhi transferred from her prestigious high school to Safi's school in order to be able to take the Liberal Arts courses offered there. Despite their different ambitions~Safi had wanted to become a teacher, and Siddhi a famous philosopher~and, despite their religions and class positions, they struck up a friendship, mostly based on the seeming impossibility of their idealistic

12 dreams. While in high school Siddhi realized that she had "strange" feelings for Safi, which she knew better than to reveal to anyone, including Safi.

It took almost 20 years of adult friendship—conducted via telephone, personal visits, and letters—for Siddi to reveal her sexual identity to Safi. It was their oddly enduring friendship, their complicated closeness which unwittingly led to Safi's death, and which haunted Sydney. Sydney saw Jonathan as someone who, years after the murder, might have helped to bring to justice the perpetrator who was known to Sydney.

Included in the novel, like punctuation or self-explanatory vignettes, are letters to Siddhi from Safi. These begin with notes sent during class while in high school, and continue on to letters that tell of Safi's transition into a life of "high-class" living. They also show her attempts as an avowedly straight woman to understand Siddhi' s sexual identity.

An omniscient voice takes over to chronicle a trip to Trinidad made by Siddhi not long before Sydney's walk to the hospital as told to Jonathan in the opening of the novel. Siddhi returned to Trinidad for the memorial service for Safi, who had been kidnapped in a spate of kidnappings and murders occurring mostly to Indian people involved in big business. Borrowing from the real-life race problems in that country at present, the perpetrators in this case are thought by Indians to be blacks- people of African origin. Even though ransom money was paid, Safi was not returned. Three months later, her decomposed, chopped up body was found. On that return, Siddhi was given by Safi's husband an envelope addressed to her, clearly opened and resealed, stamps in place, all ready to have been mailed, that had been left in Safi's car the day she was "kidnapped" in exchange for a ridiculously small sum of money. In the envelope are drafts that amount to $6000 and a letter urging

13 Siddhi to use it for (discreetly unspecified in the letter) breast reduction surgeries Siddhi had admitted thinking about. On the plane back to Toronto Siddhi was horrified to see in a newspaper the face of a man of Indian origin who had been taken in by the police for questioning in regards to several of the kidnappings, Safi's most significantly. Siddhi found herself confused by the fact that she recognized the man's face. She realized in no time that he was a worker at Safi's house; on a previous visit to Trinidad, she and Safi had been lying on a bed in the guest room of Safi's mansion-like, ocean front home, the door closed, the large window uncurtained. Safi moved close to Siddhi and rested her head on Siddhi's shoulder. Siddhi turned her head away from Safi, faced the glare of the large picture window, through which she saw the silhouette of the man pass by, his head clearly turned toward them, and she had instinctively pulled away from Safi. She did not say anything to Safi for fear of embarrassing her. She moved away, got up, and drew the curtain. She got back into the bed, and they resumed their position, but this time she pulled Safi closer. They fell asleep like that, but she was awakened suddenly by the click of the room's door shutting. She got up again, and tiptoed to the door. When she opened it the hall smelled of the sweat of the man's body, but he was not to be seen. Siddhi had again said nothing to Safi for fear of embarrassing or worrying her. Later that day when she came face to face with the man again, in the yard at Safi's house, she noted a darkness come over his face, a blistering disgust—of which she had again said nothing to Safi. Sydney remains burdened by his (I, as the author, choose to use the pronoun his here when referring to Sydney, out of a political commitment-such commitment underlying many of the choices in the writing process-to honour the character's chosen gender) choice never to report this incident to the Trinidad police, or to anyone else. As well as confessing his unexplained departure from Jonathan's life, Sydney passes the burden of Safi's death onto Jonathan~a foreigner who might be able to speak of the homophobia in the murder, and escape the fate of recognition that will no doubt befall the messenger.

14 V

Although the themes are vastly unrelated, the writing style of this novel considers what I have learned from W.G. Sebald's use of language in his work Austerlitz, where the content of the story is underlined by the weight a sentence is given through its structure and its use of punctuation, as well as the digressions within it that loop around and create a crocheting effect of storytelling, of a character's way of arriving at an understanding of the inexplicable, and of telling the indescribable. I wouldn't be so bold as to compare Austerlitz' s story to that of either of my two main characters, but Sebald's use of language is instructive. The stories of Siddhi/Sydney and Safi, the two protagonists in Moving Forward Sideways, are entirely different from Austerlitz''s, but W.G. Sebald's understanding of the relationship between written language and dysphoria in story telling-as explored in his The Natural History ofDestruction- is instructive for telling Siddhi's/Sydney's and Safi's stories.

Moving Forward Sideways is a literary mapping of how race, religion, gender and sexuality function in and as class in Trinidad. As the novel develops I would like to explore how these translate (or don't translate) in Canada, in Toronto specifically, and how they mark the body and the psyche of an immigrant of colour who suffers, in particular, from what is commonly called gender dysphoria.

In the novel I do not offer a correction of the way society is by turning upside down the power structures and imagining a cordoned off world where queerness rules. Rather, I attempt to de- hierarchize and complicate the several worlds in which my main character, Sydney, a transgendered man, lives as a raced and queer-and thus lower class (despite his upper class origins)-immigrant, in Toronto, and in his other home Trinidad where as a transgendered person he is alienated from all society, including the upper class society into which he was born. My hope is that this flattening out, or side by side chronicling, of the various worlds Sydney negotiates as a functioning citizen-whether

15 those worlds acknowledge his presence or not— creates a horizontal plane of possible relations rather than a vertical, hierarchical one, where Sydney's experiences are seen not as either special or unremarkable, but as integral to a social system that might be powerful, but ultimately dysfunctional and sick. In this way I aim not to deny that, as Lukacs writes, "what matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary" (33-34). Moreover, if indeed "the major realists of the day are swimming against the mainstream of literary development" (Lukacs 29), then at the heart of my novel in progress is an attempt-however biased it may be- at a kind of realism to which, Lukacs insists, the writer must pay heed to in order "to understand the correct dialectical unity of appearance and essence" (33). If this latter statement, too, is true (leaving aside the question of dialectics), then it was this "essence" that was missing for me in Anthony's realistic portrayal of life in San Fernando when he did not "perceive - as a creative writer—the true significance of whatever phenomenon he depict[ed]" (Lukacs 33).

The debates on realist aesthetics that involved Lukacs, Block, Brecht, and Adorno have sparked my interest, as in my writing I have been attempting to hone what I would call a kind of realism that digs beneath the surface of appearance not only to understand power relations on the visible surface of specific societies, but also to expose what lies beneath that surface, or off to the side, or even buried, that the eye in the centre dismisses in willful unknowingness. Even though my agenda veers away from the literary movements that go by the name of Realism- bourgeois realism, magical realism-I suggest that my practice and style ofwriting- which, in part, is to oscillate between/among the real/ the desired, and the possible/the impossible in order to create a space in which something new is imaginable~is a truer form of realism. I suggest that my "agenda" in terms of representation (and the requisite politics that accompany it) speaks to a deeper realism, a realism of the possible.

16 Weighing any facility I might have with theory and philosophy against a continuously consciously honed writing process and agenda, the latter bears more heavily; what I know best is my creative process. I have come to realize that in the analysis phase of the thesis I have been trying to force a reading of my novel through and onto Butler, Adorno, and Lukacs, aspects of whose works rang true to what I have been trying to do in my writing. I had intended to draw on Butler's Antigone 's Claim, specifically her critique of the notion of a pre-political language, to show how in my work that recognizes the weight of the political and the paternal on queer story telling I try to wrest away the visual from "the state" ( or status quo)-long ago already mediated by language- and to translate it into a broken-up queer verbal, but, while it could be done, this was a case of trying to turn a small twitch of recognition into a crank that was grander than it deserved to be.

With the novel aspect of this thesis more or less completed, I knew that I had to continue casting my net, into which, after Butler, Adorno, Lukacs, and others, finally, landed Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti- Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. I recognized in their style of writing, as well as in their theories and philosophy, a reverberation with what I have been trying to do in my style and mode of writing as much as in the content of the novel. For a range of reasons, I could read these highly abstract theorists through aspects of the novel, and vice-versa.

In particular, what spoke to me was their aphoristic, fragmented style, which provides several and various points of entry- including references drawn from the sciences, mathematics, and humanities- into their texts as well as many ways out- including their recommendation on how one might read the book that most concerns this paper, A Thousand Plateaus. This theoretical text explicitly resists linear argument—they say right away that the chapters are not chapters—"a book all the more total for being fragmented" ( 6 ). In the Translator's Foreward Brian Massumi takes the liberty-a privilege based on

17 his necessary study and understanding of Deleuze and Guattari' s intentions- of recommending that one approach the book as one might listen to a record, replaying some tracks and ignoring others altogether ( xiii-xiv ).

VI

Deleuze and Guattari' s affirmation of the inevitable temporal instability of writing and reading resonated highly with my writing practice and process. As a novel writer, I have come to be aware that "revelations" of my intentions in writing had been formed ~ as well as formed into pronouncements- after the stories were written. My finished published novels inflect my statements regarding my initial intentions, rather than the other way around whereby a conscious intention might have directed the story"s coming into being. This happens often after I have come to "see" what it is that I wrote based on queries from readers (met at festivals and readings that are part of the book-deal contract with my publisher) and responses to my work made by students and professors who engage with it through study. I often know better what it was that I didn't have in mind. It is in being asked that I am forced- long after the work has been made, and is out of my mind-to offer up a statement. This statement usually ends up being directed by my perception about the impulse behind the question, and the opportunity, in activist fashion, to make a politically inflected statement. Indeed, just as a critic may opportunistically read my fiction writing through her or his method of inquiry on one day, and then employ a different methodology on another, so too, I have been opportunistic in interpreting my own work to come up with "my intentions," so that my "work may be realist in June, and anti realist in December" (Seldem and Widdowson 94).

The gist of any specific novel can usually be summed up in a paragraph or two, as it usually is in the "blurb" on the book's jacket cover. Remove the blurb's market-driven hyperbole (hugely entertaining,

18 hypnotically beautiful, etc), and a version of my own pitch culled for interviews for Valmiki 's Daughter, my most recent published novel, goes something like this:

Valmiki, an Indo Trinidadian doctor living in South Trinidad, wants to save his studious, plain-looking daughter Viveka— on the verge of discovering her sexual identity and falling in love with a French woman married to a close family friend— from making the same mistake he made when, in order to escape the social and familial shame of his own homosexuality, he entered into a heterosexual marriage with Viveka' s none-the-wiser mother. He watches as Viveka, disheartened by the same pressures he faced twenty some years earlier, prepares to marry a Trinidadian man resident in Canada. What he doesn't know is that Viveka has already made the decision that her forthcoming marriage is a way out of Trinidad, an escape from the homophobia of her family and town's small world- a rickety vehicle, but one, nevertheless, that takes her towards the desperate promise of sexual authenticity assumed to be available in another land.

This summary could only have been written once the novel was finished. The original idea for the novel was simpler: a man watches as his daughter is about to make the same mistake he made, but he feels he can't stop her because it would mean revealing, to the detriment of his entire family, his own secrets. The daughter must choose between passionate love for another woman and what her family and her society expect of her. The idea, proposed by many writers, including VS Naipaul, that one comes to see what one's novel is about only after writing it is partially correct, for discovery occurs again and again throughout the writing process as ideas thicken and simultaneously deepen, and unforeseen tentacles evolve out of the writing process itself, allowing the writer to make the decision either to stick to a direct story line and write the surface, situational drama, or to dig deep to uncover the hows and whys of a particular society's psychology. Over the course of beginning and seeing several writing projects through to the end, one is honing a craft, a method. I have come to recognize a

19 pattern in my own process, and learned to capitalize on its benefits. I begin with the one line plot— a man watches as his daughter is about to make the same mistake he made, but he feels he can't stop her because it would mean revealing, to the detriment of his entire family, his own secrets; but in the fleshing out of the details that make a story compelling- landscape, interpersonal relationships, the particular timbre of a character's voice, the quality of light, the odour of a room- the story idea gushes like a volcano spewing upwards, and I have come to know that I must look, not so much at the upward gushing display, but down and off to the sides of the volcano's mound where the lava runs, and to follow its many tentacles to find the full extent of the story, extensions I had not anticipated at the beginning, but that I come to see as the story's breadth, and that in fact reveal its point, perhaps more so than the gushing plot line. Deleuze and Guattari' s rhizome.

The point of writing Valmiki 's Daughter turned out, then, to be bigger than my original two-line plot line, and required its 396 pages to parse what it means to be an Indo Trinidadian, to be a doctor, to be the daughter of such, to be these as well as homosexual in a complex place like South Trinidad where an individual's behavior is supposed to be both a product of and a testament to one's racial, religious, and class grouping. Unpacking how power is perceived to be had, by both sides, in locals cavorting with white women- the specificities pertaining to local whites different from overseas ones- in these communities needed the length and space, not just that given by 396 pages, but in the writing process itself. As the novel grew from page to page, a story deeper than the original plot line organically developed to flesh out a small world where these situations could have been shown to be endemic to a society entangled with a particular history of racial and class conflict. But the surprise to me as its writer was how the story grew, as I asked the question, "But what was the seed of this kind of behavior or this kind of thinking?", to show how that small world was already and continued in a dynamic way

20 to be a product of the old Empire, as represented by France, and by a newer contemporary one, as represented by Canada.

Deleuze and Guattari' s creative approach to the writing of philosophy remains transparent in the finished product ofA Thousand Plateaus, suggesting that the creativity, and its transparency, of their style of writing and presentation are all bound up in the larger, philosophical meaning of the work. As a writer who admittedly writes in the mainstream (as evidenced by my publisher's marketing of me and my work) of Canadian literature, I envy the self-granted permission to write right to the end so blatantly; I recognize their process and intent, and delight in the realization that mine, in my fiction writing, bears similarities. While I bemoan the fact that in the late drafts of my work I must prune and stake my plot and subplots and the meta-narratives into more common, more linear, structured readability, I find myself driven to this very labour precisely because I both assume and fear that my intended audience has no patience or love for the messiness of contradiction and instability, regardless of the truths that these enable. This is not a pandering to what readers of mainstream fiction want, nor to a despotic didacticism on my part, but rather reflects my simpler desire to have the important revelations in the work recognized. Resonant, too, in A Thousand Plateaus was the authors' incorporation of numerous and diverse, seemingly contradictory, elements to create a whole which refuses a static, homogeneous unity. In this highly theoretical work, they oscillate from a lyrical, literary style and sources to a fiercely acute analyses of representation, and, always, refuse what they call a despotic relationship between writer and audience. For me, this means that the artistic, theoretical, and political agendas of a work—whether that work is an analytical thesis essay or a novel— can be immanent to the work itself, inside the text, as it were.

21 Writing Fiction:

Moving Forward Sideways

a novel in progress

22 Jonathan

Sydney likes, just before sunset, to be wheeled right to the edge where the lawn butts the low wall that, although made of stone, miraculously keeps his acreage and his house on it from slipping down the cliff to the lip of beach and sea below. I rolled him out not long ago, having arrived at the house just before his usual jaunt, so to speak, when in my absence he is brought out to this very spot by Lancelot, his nursemaid. A red and black plaid wool blanket I had foolishly brought for him the first time I visited this tropical island was draped on his lap as if the air here were as chilly as a late fall Toronto evening. When I come down here now and see the blanket I can't help but think of stories of aid agencies battling the after effects of disasters in tropical countries, appealing to well-meaning people from cold countries, like myself, I suppose, not to make donations of duvets, wool blankets, fur coats and the like. I have to laugh at my own ignorance, but Sydney uses the blanket. I don't know if it is because it suits his personal needs, or because it was I who brought it for him. When I left Toronto this morning it was awfully cold for June. Such cold there, and such suffocating heat here, the extremes available to a single person in a single day.

23 The sea in front of Sydney's house shimmers gold and onyx, and the sky, shot across only minutes ago with wispy tails of gold-dappled airplane exhaust, is already turning bloody brown. Lake Ontario and The Gulf of Paria are both, in general, unanimated bodies of water. Of course the lake can become quite treacherous with lashing water and two-meter waves in a fall storm, for instance, but one reminds me always of the other. When I am here I think ofthat lake, and when I am in Toronto, I long for the view before me now. Of course, on the Lake one doesn't see these kinds of cake-white tiered cruise ships that are anchored in the foreground of my view of the placid Gulf here. Ahead, mid- ground, the iron bulk of oil tankers faded rust-orange lean back as they await cargo from the refinery. One can see tiny flickers of orange flames that indicate where the refinery is. Lights on the lower decks of the cruise ships have begun to come on. Tourists from those ships wills say, "Yes, I know Trinidad, I have been there." But sailors who have slept with women hired just off the wharf in Port of Spain know better and know more. I, too, say, "I know Trinidad". But, when I say this I mean I know of day to day details first hand: the German shepherd that belongs to the neighbour across the road got away and fought with another neighbour's small dog and that the small dog had to be put down because of bites to its neck; nothing was done about the German shepherd or its owners because, it is said, the man there is a suspected drug lord and it is rumoured, too, that he had friends in the police force. I know that the youngest son of Mrs. Allen-the guava cheese lady-just won a scholarship in the recent nationwide high school exams. I know the smell of mildewed cracks in the floor tiles of the bathroom of a private, crumbling residence, the unpleasant surprise of cockroaches lurking at the dry mouth of the drain, their antennae waving intelligences to each other, the smell of the combination of thyme, shadon beni, garlic, ketchup, soya sauce, sesame oil and burnt sugar, I can see crystalline amber shards of the burnt sugar stuck to a wooden spoon that stirred a chicken in a frothy pot in the kitchen ofthat same house. I know how paint on concrete steps plasticizes and bubbles in the sun and

24 splits with a surprising crack when poked with a fingernail. I know what it is to need to sponge off a sick man here when there is no water in the taps, and the two tanks—most people have one, but Sydney has two—at the back of the house have gone dry. I know how a garden of plants that tower to the height of a house here but are stunted in pots inside houses where I come from can wilt and then crisp in the dry season, and how odd—how humourous and pleasant— it is to be served food in china plates and to sip rum from cut glass tumblers even as there is no electricity for days, and for weeks no water in the taps, except for a possible two hour reprieve in the most inconvenient hours of the night time when both, without notice, might become available, causing a scurrying of people throughout the neighbourhood who half asleep are attuned to the most distant rumble of the awakening taps, and they pull themselves together without a single complaint to gather pails, pans, drinking cups and catch as much water as possible. It is Sydney though, Sydney the man, Sydney the person, who I want to know, and can't seem to reach. A person can tell you stories to fill in chasms of time, but the stories are just strung words that might indeed have furnished a few images, a few pictures, but their full meaning is often lost because the context of the era is mostly always missing-what was playing on the several radio stations in those days, what the politicians were saying about health care, about taxes, about privatization of government services, about immigration, what the crimes ofpassion were at the time, what the private neighbourhood scandals were, and the public ones, the rumours and innuendos, who killed who, and who gave birth, who just got together and who just got dumped, so to speak, the scores of the villages, the city's or the nation's sports teams, the price of a taxi ride across town, of a hot dog on the street corner, or a doubles from one vendor as opposed to from another. Even the knowledge of what was happening a continent away would add light and give shading to a story. So, when Sydney tells me his stories, which he does, I have the sense of words falling like coins in a bottomless bucket, clanking against the bucket's sides, but never landing. It is not that I think he is telling lies-certainly

25 not—but that even he doesn't know the entirety of his own story. Sydney's stories were concurrent with mine, and some of his stories took place not far from where I lived with my mother, but these facts seem to make his stories all the more uncatchable, as if he and I lived in different periods of history. It is possible that I don't really need intelligence of the scandals, rumours and innuendos of the time, and that what I actually want is to know where and how I figured in his stories. Perhaps I will never know, because from my own point of view I will never have figured enough. Did he think of me when, and even after, he left us? He is only recently learning how large he was in my imagination. How wrong I was, about everything, it seems. The nuts and bolts of Sydney's stories would be lost to me if it weren't for the settings in which they took place, and which he takes pains to recall for me, as much as for himself, as if the stories couldn't have happened had it not been for those places that contained them. But how odd it is to hear in such vivid detail of one landscape, no matter how well one knows it, and even has a sense of ownership over it, when in another. The first time I was faced with the contradictions was not when I was here looking at the Gulf and thinking of Lake Ontario, but nine years ago when, sitting with Sydney at the dinner table inside of this house, eating curried goat with paratha roti, on the second evening of my visit that lasted one week, he began to tell me, in minute details, of his walk, one winter's morning, to St. Michaels Hospital. He didn't begin from the very beginning~the beginning ofthat day being only a minor beginning, but the beginning which from my point of view would have started with him leaving our house. But he began with a time when he stood in the lobby of his apartment building on Wascana Street, almost a decade after that day that I remember so clearly, and that, I hate to admit, he seems to have relegated to some minor place in his memory. The heat register inside the glass-walled entrance of the apartment building thrummed, he had begun. The area around which his Salvadorian mitten-covered hands were pressed had frosted a size larger in two perfectly splayed hand shapes. His hands were already hot in the thick wool he had

26 pulled on the instant he closed his apartment door, and the cold off the glass had been welcome. I would liked to have stood there all day, he said, imagining that the heat of my body was infinite, was so powerful, that I was almost certain that it, he continued, could have melted away snow and ice, and warmed, if not the city, at least the entrance on Wascana Street. I felt invincible that day, he told me, adding that Buddhists say that a change in a person creates a change in that person's environment, and knowing that I was on the verge of personal change of seismic proportions, I entertained fantasies of myself as the catalyst that could have halted your Canadian winters in their track. But your winters are unstoppable. He had laughed when he said that, and besides the odd defensiveness I felt around him shoving the winters in my lap when I knew that Sydney was by the time a Canadian citizen and they were then as much his as they were mine (the making of such distinctions seemed petty, in any event, but I seem never to be above pettiness in matters concerning Sydney), I was reminded of how he used to encourage me to wish for and to imagine the impossible, the act and process of wishing and imagining being of equal and even of greater value than the realizing of one's dreams. My mother would be upstairs in her study writing-she was a novelist of some renown-and we would be in the dining room or in the living room, Sydney insisting that I try and fly. He never told me that it would be impossible, but with swimming-like gestures-the breast-stroke I came to understand it to have been- we would thrust our heads up and chests forward into the room, and with our arms we would slice through the air, catch it in our turned-out palms and sweep it back, and I do remember the air to have felt thick and as leaden as water might have felt, and we would make our way through the rooms, I expecting lift off any second. Lift-off, of course, never came. At least not in the manner I had at first imagined. I had been using a knife and a fork to eat with, and he stopped telling his story long enough to instruct me to tear off the roti with my fingers and to use it like a little rag to wipe up pieces of the goat and its gravy and to usher it into my mouth with the tips of my fingers. He watched as I did it, and

27 I knew that he was satisfied with my learning when, as abruptly as he had stopped he began again. It was seven thirty in the morning, he said, and I could have left later, but I wanted to have enough time to stop and watch, and appreciate and remember - or rather acknowledge—the past, my past, well enough that it would travel solidly into the future with me. This was important to do, because I was on a journey that out of some necessity could, if I were not diligent, have erased my past. Sydney looked at me at this point, and smiled wistfully. He said, Of course the past is not erasable, and is even always present. I wondered if I were part of this erasable and yet present past. I would have preferred if he had added that he also wished not to erase it. But he did not. He carried on, rather, saying, And so I could stand there between the lobby and entrance doors, and just watch: large flakes, flimsy and light like dust bunnies, floated down on the other side of the door.

Then he said, There used to be, Jonathan, and the phrase has stayed with me. Until recently everyone called me Jon, or Jonny, which when my mother calls me I know she wants some favour that would take me a distance out of my way. But Sydney has only ever called me Jonathan, from the day I was born, apparently. In moments of tenderness he called me Sweetness Itself. When I returned to Canada, I began asking people to use my full name. There was some teasing, and a reaction of defensiveness, but now everyone has come on board and I am called Jonathan-except by my mother.

There used to be, Jonathan, he had said, two or three snowfalls every year that brought the city to its knees, hardly ever for more than a few days. The city was always ill prepared. Is it still like this, Jonathan? Side streets used always to be low on the priority list of those to be ploughed, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were still like this. Is it? You know, the sea- and he pointed across the table, in the direction of the Gulf-seems to have risen, even as it has become hotter and drier in the dry season, but there is much more rain nowadays in the wet season. It's as if we have monsoons here

28 now. Have the Toronto winters gotten colder, or have they become milder, Jonathan? Everything has changed. Everything is still changing. Is the change in the Toronto weather noticeable? I mean, would I notice a change there? (My heart leapt at the several acknowledgements he had made. He was not interested in my response, for I had barely begun to say that I usually went away in the winter months, but had heard that the weather had become erratic and unpredictable). Well, on that morning I am telling you about, he continued, after weeks of one snow storm after another, shoveled snow had been piled high on sidewalks-thankfully the building supervisor had done an adequate job of cutting a wide path on the stoop, the full width of the stairs right down to and including the concrete paving of the sidewalk. Street lamps were still lit. The one nearest the door of the building in which I lived carried on a single-note buzzing and its light that had an irregular tremor set a pinkish glow to the dust-bunny- like flakes. The buzzing was louder than usual, that morning. I supposed the bulb would blow soon. I remember all of this because it was as if everything in my environment was aware of, and marking, the auspiciousness of the day for me. There was a comic-like pink aura to the darkness of the sky behind that lamp. How still the street with its evenly spaced rows of alternating gingko trees on either side, bare of greenery, new snowfall delineating their branches, that pink glow above, and lower, mid- height to the town houses, a yellowish tinge from the tungsten lighting about the doors of the houses to the left and right of us, and opposite. How clean and pretty the neighbourhood, swathed in such snowy whiteness, and the pastel shades of light cast that even as I watched was dissipating as day consumed night like a magician swallowing a string of pastel-coloured knotted silk kerchiefs.

My mind had wandered from Sydney's recounting. So much had changed in the years that had come between us, that made us strangers to each other, and yet, even in this foreign and strange country, I felt, sitting next to him, an uncommon belonging. His voice had changed as happens to people when they age, sounding as if at times it were straining against a sort of cobwebby thickness in which it was

29 encased, and then, at others, the faintest crackling in its timbre, as if the lining of the voice itself had microscopic tears out of which sound seeped. This was not only to be expected at his age, but it was, more so, welcome, as it confirmed that despite all that separated us, including amorphous time, we were yet able to meet and willing to talk. In Sydney's presence I am always made profoundly aware that what separates us also joins us. This realization—and admittedly one can realize one thing as well as another—underlines for me the bond I so much want with Sydney. What was inexplicable, what made Sydney a little strange to me, was the care he was taking in recalling, in detailing, and also how inwardly focused he seemed to have become. If I were honest with myself, I would have to say that Sydney did not seem to have kept memories of me, or had enduring concerns about me, nor did he defer to the particular relationship we had to each other, for as time went on he regaled me with the details of stories perhaps best not shared with one's ward. I want to say one 's child, but being someone's child seems to imply a reciprocated relationship, and while in those days there was—I can swear on it-such reciprocation, I am doubtful, fearful, that today it is one-way. On the other hand, I was no longer his ward, of course, was no longer a child, and the writer in me-having followed in my mother's footsteps, I suppose-was perverse, and hungered for the very details, as awkward as in moments hearing them was. I must not have missed much in my musings-it always surprises me how complex, varied, and numerous one's thoughts can be in a single moment—because he was on the same subject when my mind went back to him: But this semblance of cleanliness, he was saying, such prettiness, especially with the wind that comes up from the lake, are just that, a semblance, and deceptive.

Then, he said, I could so easily have reached into my pocket, retrieved my cell phone, and called for a cab. Naturally, I hadn't slept well the previous night. In waking bouts of anxiousness I heard the growl, groan, scrape of snow plough machines. I passed the night watching their yellow safety lights

30 dart up the far wall of my bedroom and slide across the ceiling in a one-two rest, one-two rest pattern- but its sidewalks, with the snow, rain, freeze sequence that had been that season's predictable model, were bound to be slippery, as they were. Surely it would have been reasonable to break my resolve under the circumstances, and either to have called or tried flagging down a taxi. It would have been so much safer in a taxi, if only for this knapsack (I had been fingering the rim ofplate, staring at it as I listened to him, but I found his choice of word odd—this instead ofthat, given that he was speaking of the past—and looked up at him to find that he had indeed used the correct word—this—for hè was pointing to a green knapsack that sat limply on a chair pulled up against the wall of the room in which we were eating) on my back. But, no, he said emphatically, I resolved I will walk, no matter what; how can a person ever develop character if she simply gives in, breaks her own rules, dissolves her resolve when the going gets tough? Again, I looked up, having been distracted by the knapsack and what could possibly be in it that so many years later he still kept it close to him, and this time I looked him in his eyes. He refers to himself in this way often, without the slightest flinching that might indicate that he was aware of it. Yet he cringes noticeably if he were referred to in this manner by someone else (I had made the mistake once in speaking of him in this way to Lancelot). But the confusion that I feel when he does this is about my own delight in the moment of him referring to himself in this way, for it confirms to me, in a perverse way that renders me a pathetic yearning child- and a child I am not--that the person I once knew so intimately, and the man before me are one and the same. In the forty-seven years of my life, he added, I have learned a few things, and one of them is that tough is always yet to come.

31 The door had sealed between the warmth inside and the cold air outside. I had to shove hard to open it. It popped open against the seal, and there was a rash whipping up and sucking in of cold air into the entranceway. Snowfiakes somersaulted in the entrance, were sucked inside in circling gestures, and on hitting the ground transformed instantly into puddles of wetness in front of the heater. Cold air slammed like a hand against my face and nose and I gasped, unable for a couple of seconds to breathe. It was as if in a flash, there was a mini death, and a rebirth. If you understand that I felt as if I were on that day on a journey of death, a small death, and of my own rebirth, you would understand why I saw in all of this the same. I suppose I was looking for a rhyming and a patterning in the world about me to confirm the correctness of all that was in my own hands and pending. If you think I am speaking in riddles Jonathan, it is because I don't know how else to speak, having been trained to hide against the more natural desire to be. To simply be. Let me tell my story as I must, in the only way I know how to tell one. I am not trying to create suspense, it is already there, always, but of course one wants relief after suspense, and I must admit Jonathan, that in a life like mine, there seems to be constant suspense and little relief. Not even now. He paused and looked directly at me. I could almost see the twisting and turning and weighing of his thoughts in his eyes and in the way he held my gaze. I suppose your unexpected arrival here has brought me some relief, he said, and I, foolishly yearning, myself felt relief. It is as if he saw the pleasure this gave me flush my face, and he looked away quickly, and carried on. I pulled up the hood on my down jacket, he added, adjusted it forward and down so it protected my forehead, and I stepped outside. There was a bite to that morning's cold that, even within only seconds of feeling it, was disheartening. The obvious had formed in my mind, but it would have helped to blatantly admit it, so I whispered, "this is cold". The words wafted blue in the frigid air, and while it was not the first time for the day that I thought of Safi, I found myself speaking with her, as if she were right there with me-as she was in a number of ways. Safi, I said to Sydney, Who is Safi? Do

32 I know her? Fetch me the knapsack, he replied. It was a medium sized knapsack, much bigger than was needed for whatever sat, a small weight, at its bottom. He took the bag with both hands from me, and hugged it to his chest as if it were a pillow. I want to show you something, Jonathan, something I have shared with no one else, well, save for the person who wrote these to me, the one and the same to whom I also wrote. He unzipped the knapsack, and out of it he pulled a stuffed manila envelope, the excess of the envelope folded over, so that the package it made was half its original size, secured by a red thread that had been doubled and tied into a bow. He held up the package, stared at it and said, It's been some years since I have looked at these. I keep them with me, just like this, but I haven't looked at them in a good while now. I kept my instinct to reach out for them intact, which was a good thing, for it seemed as if in an instant he had changed his mind, and he put them back in the bag, saying, It's late, it's too late to delve into this now. Perhaps another time. A lover, or a child might have insisted, saying, Oh come on, you already started it, you can't stop now, show it. But I sensed his need to take his time, and a need too, to tell this story. So, I did not rush him, but only hoped, on account of his frailness that hasn't stopped surprising me, that nothing would happen to him before I learned whatever it was he so clearly wanted me to know. That was how I was introduced to Safi, and how Sydney began to tell me what had happened, returning again and again to that early winter's morning to St. Michael's Hospital, as if the that walk and the recounting of it were the engine that propelled him to what he really wanted known.

The mosquitoes will soon invade despite the strong breeze and we will have to return to the house. I am dressed in short pants, and although, as I learned from the radio that is turned on in the kitchen from about 6am until about 9 pm, it is 28 degrees (while the temperature here fluctuates by one or two degrees daily, the added commentary that it is "Sunny, with cloudy periods and a slight chance of showers", does not), and yet too cool for Sydney, I would like to take off my shirt, but he would

33 disapprove of such casualness, besides which in front of him I am shy about the softness of my too- pale torso that has not seen sun for the last eight months of fall, winter, and spring. It has been a year since I last saw him, since my last visit that is, too long I realize as I sit on the wide wall ledge contorting my body so that my back is somewhat to him, which position allows me, as it does him, to look to the horizon on which the southern arm of the island stretches languorously. I am filled with longing, and I imagine happiness bathing him as it does me. Why wouldn't it be so? Surely he delights in these visits, too. There are, of course, questions-—at least in my mind if not in his. The words into which they might be formed never leave my head, though, where they seem only to turn into accusation and insult. I am afraid that the relief of any possible answers would only be momentary; the very answers, as I imagine them, would be a font out of which yet more questions will surely spring. Nevertheless, we continue-him to talk, me to listen, but almost always, I have come to see, at cross-purposes to each other.

The first time I came here to Trinidad I was nine. Syd had been living with my mother and me in Toronto then, and he-still strange to say it-eventually managed to get us down for a visit. As I remember it, he used to go to Trinidad often to see his parents. Once a year, I think. It was just after that visit down that he left us, and now I am aware that much of my 'memory' has been formed, not by my own actual recollections, but by stories my mother told me about those days, gaps she filled in for me, by photographs that I seem to remember so well, yet have no memory of the contexts in which they had been taken, of what was happening just before the photos were taken, what happened after. And lately, by bits and pieces learned from Sydney himself here in Trinidad. So, however it is that I know of this, it is enough to say that Sydney had suggested numerous times that the three of us go together to Trinidad to meet his parents and his sister. My mother was not excited by the prospect of a visit to a tropical island as I was-I wanted to see the phenomenon of lizards living inside of the

34 houses: they're this big, he'd say, his eyes popping wide, chopping his left arm at the crook of his elbow, this big, and sometimes they fall off the wall and land right in your hair, and, fully imagining the plop of the lizard, its weight and wriggle, I'd double over, and shake my head so that I had the sense of my cheeks and lips swinging, and I'd swipe at my hair with both hands—and her passivity when we were finally there in his family's house leads me still to think that it was because of me that she went.

If at the time I couldn't do the math, so to speak, I was still aware of certain moments whose meanings have since become a little clearer-she and he would have just returned from a party, both of them sullen, my mother invariably saying some version of: they don't mean anything by it, you're too sensitive, why does it always have to be about you being a foreigner here? And Syd protesting that no matter how long she lived and worked here she would always be a foreigner in those circles; that she didn't understand why the only time people seemed to notice her was to ask when was the last time she had "gone back home"; that when they spoke to her there was a change in the muscles in their faces that she couldn't put into words; that whenever she began to say something someone would speak up over her and her sentence would be left hanging, forever unfinished, or if she managed to finish there would be awkward silence, as if no one knew what to make of what she'd said; how she wishes all of those people could see where she came from; that she felt exposed and invisible at the same time; that she and my mother were together for ten years and her friends treated her, still, as if she were a boulder of difference she (my mother) dragged behind her. She wasn't so different from her friends, she would say, adding, if only people here could see where she had come from-not Trinidad, but the family, the house, her family's friends, their way of living, they'd realize that she was not all that different. My mother's answer would be in her quiet stare at Syd. Syd was different. In those moments I'd resist the temptation to rush over and hold onto Syd. I couldn't go against my mother, but

35 also, I wanted to hear more. I was getting a picture of their outside world, and a picture of what went on in Syd's head when he was not indulging me. I knew from these upsets that Sydney was restless, dissatisfied, and that she and my mother were drifting apart. Years later, my mother said that it was only some time after Syd left us it had become clear to her—despite, as she said, Syd's "pained attempts at clarity"~why it was that he~and she made the switch effortlessly, I must say- -why he had wanted us to see— not the country so much, but the house in which he lived before his immigration to Canada. He had wanted us, she said, to see where he came from. It stays in my mind so vividly the way she said 'see'-twisting her mouth, rolling her eyes, shaking her head. She used to say that the problem was that Syd's other differences were too visible. I didn't understand her then, and it is only as an adult that I can see that she, with her beautiful long hair, her eye make-up and lipstick, her revealing dresses and high heels, always managed to slip in and out of the straight white world of Toronto, even when everyone knew that she and Syd were a couple. But Syd's short masculine haircut, and the clothes he wore, as tasteful and stylish as they were, were mannish. His ways were mannish. He-well, she at the time-carried his body upright and stiff, he shook men's hands rather than kissed their cheeks in greeting, he stood aside to let the women pass, he opened doors for them and let them go through before he did. His skin colour and this strange behavior in a woman, for his breasts were what gave him away then, made everyone, even my mother who had once seen it all as charming, rather uncomfortable. As usual, I heard in my mother's late awareness more than was being directly said. Of course she was telling me about Syd, but I learned something about her: that she had for some time after their parting continued to think about Syd, about why he left, and she was beginning to comprehend-too late, naturally-what was meaningful to him. Perhaps, she was in that moment beginning to understand him, but I have often wondered since then, rather sourly I have come to see, if it was the writer in her who after the fact was parsing him, concocting a romanticized version

36 of him, pathologizing him as if he were a character in one of her fictions. Her words served only to stoke my anger at her, and quicken my anguish for Syd. He grew up in a sprawling house with his sister who I remember only vaguely. I recall his mother better because she would smooth my hair down hard, as if brushing it in its natural direction with the palm of her hand, while saying what a pretty boy I was. She had liked my blond hair. As I think back now, I sense that there might have been a tinge of ridicule in her laughter at how yellow my hair was. It has, thankfully, darkened considerably since those days. The single level house was three times or so as long as it was wide. It took me about three days to find my way about in the house, and I loved the sensation of being lost yet not panicking because I felt so safe. The four bedrooms, one of which was a guest bedroom, and each one with its own bathroom, and the study that housed a large library of hard-covered books that had been autographed by their authors, were at the back of the house. My mother said nothing complimentary about the books, but she had spent a great deal of time in that room with Syd's father, formal with her even as he seemed intrigued by her, explaining in detail where each book had come from; he had contacts abroad who purchased the books, had them sent to and signed by the authors, and mailed to him. In my recent visits I have not been back to that house, but I remember it well, having had the sense that since it was Syd's it was mine also, a sentiment my mother did not seem to share. The ceiling of the house rose from the back to the front, even as the floor of the house descended by four or five stairs every third of the way to the front. By the very front of the house, the ceiling was about twenty feet high. There were two living rooms. One was just off the rather big kitchen in the centre of the house, with a television in it, but even so, I was mesmerized by the larger living room to the very front of the house, a formal room with heavy furniture that had cream coloured silk upholstery and throw cushions that were dressed in shiny gold and silver fabrics with glass beads that I was caught by my mother, and to her embarrassment, twisting around and around. A crystal chandelier hung over a

37 large square coffee table on which crystal animals to heavy for me to lift stretched up or sprawled. I would kneel on the rug on the terrazzo floor-which I hadn't thought of for a very long time, but which suddenly I recall having been mostly yellowish in colour, polished gleaming and smooth with white and luminous green flecks of stone, and pieces of alabaster shell—and I would lean my elbows on the table and stare at the distorted, elongated refractions of the room in the body of the crane with its smooth extended neck and stretched-out beak, at the concentric circles of a snail's shell, at the bursts and swirls of suspended colour in the weighty fish. I once, when no one was around, put my mouth on one of the two little knobbed protrusions of cool glass on the head of the snail, and sucked the blob of an eye. At night when the chandelier was lit I sat at the table and stared at the stabs of light about it. The house was left to Sydney and his sister, but once both parents had passed away, they sold it. Sydney's sister lives in the north with a family of her own, and he lives in this house here in West Moorings that is much too big, by Canadian standards, for a single person, on a property he bought with his share of the sale of the house. He had this one built and now lives "alone" in it, as he says, but he is in fact attended by more servants than a sole inhabitant, even if he is an invalid now, should need. One gets the impression that he is, in a simultaneously benevolent and devious way, providing room and board for disenfranchised people. Shortly after we returned to Canada Sydney disappeared, so to speak. I must have asked for him every day for a couple of years, to which my mother answered, by way of explanation, "It was time for Syd to leave. It was long overdue". I didn't know then, and still don't know now if she meant that it was time for him to leave us, or to leave Canada. Perhaps she meant both. I did not see Sydney again until I paid my second visit to the island. My mother, who apparently, and to my great irritation-to understate it-knew more than she had ever admitted, suddenly revealed some things about their past. She, with some resignation when I insisted despite her revelations that I wanted to try and find Syd, warned me what to expect. I blamed her, particularly for

38 all that he eventually did to himself. It is only in retrospect that I can see that such blaming was a result of my own projections, my conflicted empathy. It was nine years ago that I found out that Syd, after continuing to live in Toronto for some years, returned to Trinidad, and it was then, on learning this, that I arrived, unannounced-as I had worried that had I tried to contact him I might have been turned away in one way or another—to find Sydney in this very house. Since then, I have come to see him at least once each year, except for two consecutive years when I came down three times in each for, having given me medical power of attorney on my second visit, my attendance during some serious health episodes was required. He suffers with diabetes and, as they say here, from his heart, one of the consequences of all the tampering with his body and the drugs.

I can only for a short time bear the twist the position on the wall requires, and must adjust and resume a new position that keeps me looking away from him. It is not strange that we continue to be shy with one another. It takes time, each visit here, for us to relax, but only somewhat. Even as Sydney coaxes me, he maintains a parochial sternness, as if his own experience dictates that he not condone a flagrant expression of myself, regardless of how alike he and I have turned out to be. There is time enough to continue to ask the questions I never seem to get adequate answers for. Sydney has his own questions, and I wonder if my answers satisfy him. I am coming to the conclusion that, my questions at least, may not be answerable. Certainly not to my satisfaction. There is time enough, too, to fight Sydney- for this is how it always goes-although he absorbs my punches like a pillow. Sydney is one of the few people capable of catching my punches, of reducing me, of holding me. One might say he is one of the few I allow such intimacies, for that is what they are. I have adjusted myself, the kink on one side of my body eased and a new one on the other side fast forming, and turn to face again the horizon with its faint slip of land that runs its length, the placid Gulf of Paria between us and it, and in doing so I have just caught a glimpse of Sydney's face. He stares out too, the black pupils of his eyes catching the last

39 hints of evening light, the smile on his face there from the moment I arrived, weighted now with wistfulness and I suspect he thinks, as do I, of when we were a family, he, me and my mother, a time when he, although no blood-relation, was closer to me than anyone, and upon further reflection I might add even until now, has ever been.

My mother's name, I will reveal with some shame, is India, although she has not a drop ofthat blood in her. Or so she maintains-her skin has a natural and unEnglish olive complexion, and her hair used to be a dark brown that lit up with natural red highlights in the sun. When I was a child I used to be quite in awe, that a saffron-coloured triangular country, so many leaps and bounds away from the large pink of Canada on the map of the world was named after her. This idea had been in my head for so long, and encouraged, too, that when I was eventually informed that it was quite the other way around, I was adamant and unable to make the switch for a very long time.

It was Sydney who stoked my desire to "leave home", to go where my edges might be rubbed raw, with the placemat-sized laminated map of the world on which he had marked my mother's country of origin with a push pin-—the sculpturally shaped tower of Great Britain, that is, pricked at the point of Stroud. The head of another pin all but obliterating his own green speck of Trinidad, and his land of ancestry which was~it was he who had mischievously put the idea in my head-named after my mother and marked at the point of Calcutta. The vast expanse of white that was Canada, he would rub with his finger, circling the area of middle Ontario, the red head of the pushpin splitting the word Toronto in to Tonto. It was Sydney-this same Sydney sitting here in his wheelchair, I must remind myself-who fixed my mother's pink silk kimono on me after I had wrestled with its oversized shoulders on my meager four year old ones, who tied the sash, who adjusted one of her black broad- brimmed hat son my head, and who, to my mother's amusement the first time, but subsequent

40 irritation, applied lipstick with a brush on my lips. I remember the sensation well. He would cup my face—as if it were a jewel-egg—in one hand, and I, staring up into his face, would feel the thin brush slowly outline my lips, and I would experience an exquisite weightlessness in my chest as the thin point moved along, and a tickle throughout my entire body. I remember feeling that first time that I would faint—wanting to, in fact, knowing that Sydney would catch me. It was Sydney who, despite the wish to wrestle and tumble and ransack with this little fatherless boy, understood that I would rather curl up quietly and be read to, so that while my mother shut her door so that she could quietly write her books, he read to me. It was Sydney who took me to the botanic gardens and taught me what a plant needs to grow and to bear flowers and fruit, and that gardens could be planted specifically to encourage visits by butterflies, and by birds. It was Sydney and it was Sydney. Poor Sydney. It was Sydney-to blame for everything, to applaud for everything. I had not until these visits to him in Trinidad understood how he could have left us, so abruptly it seemed. I took his leaving more personally than my mother did. I was the centre of my own universe and Sydney my orbiting reflection. All his doing, of course.

41 Sydney's bedroom is large and its wood paneled walls are painted a light and sunny shade of sea green. We would eat breakfast together, stay at the table chatting for quite a while after we had finished eating, and then he would go back to his room to be washed and groomed, and would then take a nap for an hour or so. During that time, I would usually go to my room to write on my computer for a couple hours, and then I would go awaken him, and we would make our way to the garden to see how the roses were doing. One morning, after having spent a couple of hours writing, I had knocked on his door but he must not have heard. The windows were wide open and a cool pleasant light washed the sparse room. He was lying on top of the made-up double bed in boxer shorts and a white tank top, his legs thin, the muscles gone soft now, and scattered about him were notes and letters, some opened out, some folded. The green knapsack lay off to the side. On my entering, he made to gather up the lot, but in mid gesture stopped and said, Safi, remember I told you once about Safi? She was such a lot of fun. It makes me so happy, and I suppose sad, too, to read these. I am in the happy phase. He had been shaved and his skin was a slight powdery gray. He smiled and appeared to be healthy, both in his body and in his spirits. He picked through the letters deftly, gathered up a few. Look, he said, let me show you a couple of her letters. The first ones. You must read them in the sequence in which she sent them.

Dear Dhani,

Fm not saying you were missed, so don't get a big head. It's just that there was nobody to provide me with my much needed quota of comic relief. This note is just to let you know that I am doing the Job Miss Augusta saddled me with-looking after rejects from other schools-I'm getting to like it. Gives me a glimpse of my potential. What happened to you anyway? Guess I'll find out when you get back. That's the problem with having no phone. The problem with living in the cane fields. It was Eid yesterday. I brought seiwine from home for you. Your loss.

42 Safi

Dear Siddhani, Yes, but that says something about initiative and taking advantage of the fact that everyone has power and choice and the power to exercise choice. And my ancestors chose not to become Presbyterians like most of these morons' families here. If you'd like to become a Muslim I can introduce you to our Imam. He won't hold the fact that you are still a Hindu against you. We know our ancestors were once, too. Choice and power. You too, have it.

S.

Don't pass any more notes through Johnstone. I don't know what's wrong with her today. She might go and tell on us. We didn't get our marks back in Chemistry yet. I can't wait. I bet I beat her again. Brains but no sense of humour and no community spirit. Did you get your marks yet?

Dhani, it's not always about believing, you moron. (You, I will capitalize for. You Moron). It's about holidays and food, too. You like seiwine, I know that. OK, so get serious. What am I supposed to do for Assembly? I don't want to talk about being a Muslim, don't want to talk about God, don't think it's fair that we have no choice in this. I could hand out recipes for seiwine, and have everyone recite it along with me.

Look at Augusta's shoes. What do you think of them?

43 Not my taste either. She can't dress to save her life.

What's wrong with you? Am I annoying you?

I wanted Sydney there and then to tell me about Safi, but when I asked him what had happened to her, he told me what he wanted to tell me~that the notes were written in high school, and he told me how they met, and how their school-age friendship unfolded. But he wanted to tell me, instead, the story of that walk to St. Michael's Hospital in the aftermath of some bloody snowstorm.

This time he gathered up all the letters and tied the red string around them and put them back in the knapsack, zippering it in some haste. That morning I was telling you about, he said, the walk from my apartment on Wascana and River Streets, to the bustle of Shuter and Victoria Streets, felt interminable. You see, I was hungry. They had given me an orange sheet with information and directions. It said no food or drink except for water after midnight, and no water after 3 am. I was trying not to think of food, not to notice the light-headedness. I was wondering if I would actually be able to walk for half an hour in that horrid weather and not be unbearably hungry by the time I arrived. I shouldn't have been so hungry as I didn't usually eat breakfast, in any case. But because of the restriction on that orange piece of paper, I was perversely hungry.

44 The question for me that keeps arising as I think ofthat day is not how could any human live in such a climate or why but, rather, how could one have lived in a city, for such a long time, almost thirty years, yet not have had a soul she could—these were Sydney's words, he switched back and forth in a way that I would not have dared—or would, ask to accompany her on a mission such as that. It wasn't that there weren't people to ask, for there were a few. But, rather, that I wouldn't ask anyone. There was a woman I was particularly close to at the time—she would say that we were lovers, and I would insist otherwise, but I didn't involve her either. Michelle Cox.

I thought fast: had I ever heard of a Michelle Cox? What relation was this Michelle Cox to Safi? Had my mother ever mentioned this person? Toronto is not so big. People like my mother and Sydney, at least when he was in Toronto, and I inhabit circles within circles, and we slip in and out of subsets where the circles overlap. If you don't directly know a person, you likely knew others who knew that person. In all probability you would have heard of them. The name Michelle Cox meant nothing to me, at least not before this mention of her, and suddenly I felt as if Sydney and I had lived worlds apart in the same city. In any case, why hadn't Sydney called my mother? But, could he really have, I wondered? To my mind, she was the one he should have relied on. Had we let him down, then? And now, this Michele Cox. I admit to having momentarily felt betrayed-not on behalf of my mother- but as if Sydney, in having had an engagement with this woman, had betrayed me. I could feel the muscles in my face and neck stiffen with what I suppose was jealousy. I must have been well enough guarded, for there was no sign from Sydney that he was in the least aware of how I had taken the mention of this woman who, despite his own feelings about her, had thought of the two of them as lovers. And what did she have to do with Safi, in any case?

45 Sydney

What am I telling this boy? I am trying to tell him about Safi, but I have to tell him first about that morning when I walked to St. Michael's Hospital. But how can I tell him about any of this without mentioning Michelle? I want him to know, too, that life went on after his mother. No, he is not who I want to know this. But perhaps he will deliver the information to his mother. Nine years he is coming to visit me and she has sent to say one word. Hello. That's it. Hello. Of course he is not a boy, but it isn't only that I was there when he was conceived, me clutching and stroking India's shoulders as the doctor for the fifth and finally successful time inseminated her. And I was there, naturally, at the birth, and there just about every day and every night for almost a decade. I walked him to and from school in all ofthat time. If India wasn't writing, she was thinking, and then she was away at writers' festivals, or doing readings across the country, or attending writing and publishing related events. My art career didn't suffer, because Jonathan had by default, and yet, happily, become my work, and I excelled at this. When he came into our room in the middle of the night, having awakened with a fright, or an upset stomach, he came to my side of the bed, and got me up or came in under the covers to curl up against me. Before India decided she wanted a child she and I were friends who flirted heavily with each other. In hindsight, it was when she made her decision to get pregnant that she also decided she wanted me in her life. Until then, I had no interest in being a parent, intending that my entire focus would be on a successful art career. But it took less than a month of talk about a baby for me to be drawn in, and when Jonathan was born, I was his, and my artwork became a hobby, a time for relaxation. It isn't only these that make me think even now of Jonathan as a boy, but I can't say exactly what it is. Perhaps it is as simple as that for me Jonathan is life itself—as he was from day one~ and when he comes to visit me here it is as if the walls of the house are blown off; fresh breezes wash us all and we can suddenly breath and think and imagine. Even though I want him to know

46 everything, there are fine lines between all I actually want him to know and the small things of which he needn't have knowledge. The latter ought to include some of which I am shy about or should be ashamed to reveal. But I am compelled, as if this boy I trust is my last and best chance to tell everything. Everything means the truth. And yet I find myself constantly noosed in the line between telling every detail and the few things I am loathed to reveal, to anyone, but especially to Jonathan. Sometimes, the more you trust someone, the less you want them to know the truth about you. Yet, I am bound to this.

I had thought that Michelle and I were the closest of friends, I told Jonathan. We were not lovers. This was a, rather the, bone of contention with her. That friendship-that is what it was to me-lasted four years. We had met in a café. This would have been a couple years or so after I last saw you and your mother.

I couldn't bear to say "after I left you and your mother", but Jonathan's eyelids fluttered. It was all the remark he allowed himself. I could tell that, regardless of how it would make him feel, he did not want to be spared the tiniest detail. He was like his mother in this respect, the hard truth regardless of its cost. His technique seemed to be that he would listen and not interrupt. I found myself talking at length, seemingly inconsequential details surfacing, only to realize that they were not at all inconsequential. I was compelled to destroy the years of silence between us, and the judgments I feared he must have made. It was that sort of response, that little flutter of his eyelids, that made me go on, as if I were trying not merely to tell him, but to beg his understanding. And the more I remembered, the more I wanted to remember, and out of this, as if it were the bigger purpose, I seemed able to make some sort of deeper sense than I had previously realized of why I came to make that journey to St. Michael's Hospital. He was making me weave a net for him of India, Michelle and

47 Safi, not one of whom knew the other and yet all of whom played some part in who and what I am today. I will tell him, but there will be a cost to him, as there was for me.

I had just come to a table with my drink, sat down, and took up the mess of newspapers that was on the empty table next to me. I had been reading and sipping my coffee for a while and hadn't been paying great attention to whatever else was going on around me. I had noticed that a woman had sat down at that table on which the paper had been, but nothing about her caused me to pay any attention, until she leaned toward me and asked if she could borrow the sections of the paper I was finished with. An odd thing used to happen sometimes: I'd be in a public space and a stranger would look me directly in my face and say something about what was going on around us, and simultaneously with hearing what they were saying I would be aware that they assumed that I spoke English like they did, that is, that they didn't think, on account of my colour, that I mightn't speak English, and I would be aware too that they felt some sort of affinity with me, that we were on the same side, the same team, and that he or she could commiserate with me about what was going on around us. And even though no introductions would be made, and we would not likely come upon one another again, there would for me be a flash of a sense of belonging, of not being alone, ofbeing visible, ofbeing thought of as having a worthy point of view. That is how it was when the woman at the table, after reading for a few minutes, leaned over with the paper, and tapping the article beneath a photo of a model who it took a hard look at to determine was male, said, "This is a great shirt. It would look good on you." I looked at her. Her eyes were a dirty blue, and she wore no make-up. Her hair was deep blond, and her face was sort of flat, longish really, very flat cheekbones. Even as I was aware that I was not attracted to her in the least, I felt an intimacy, as if we had known each other for a long time, two old friends sitting having coffee together, reading, one turning casually to commiserate as one might to a friend.

48 We slept together. This lasted about two weeks during which time we saw each other every day. But that didn't last. I could count on both hands the number of times we slept together. I had in those two weeks run the gamut of feelings-from the excitement of the possibility of having found love and a possible life-time companion to the realization that we had little, save for the city we were living in, in common: our histories and culture, the landscapes of our childhood and youth, the music we had grown up with, the fairy tales, heroes and heroines, the novels, television programs, jokes, the manners, the games and toys, bore no resemblance. We might have built swinging bridges between these cultural differences, but there was another that we could not bridge, and I don't know, Jonathan, if this other would make sense to you. There was a roughness about her, a slight lack of fineness that grated like sandpaper on my nerves. After that two-week period, Michele and I managed something of a friendship that lasted four years. I dated women in that time and had my eyes open as I looked out for a lifetime companion, partner, lover, or however you might like to term it. Michelle, each time I began dating another woman, disappeared all together, not returning my phone calls or emails, until I was once more on my own-she always seemed to know when I was no longer dating someone~at which time she would return, and she was assiduous about making herself indispensible as she picked up my broken pieces. This was a mutual indulgence-symbiotic, yes, except that for me her attentions quickly grew heavy and tedious. Of the people I might have called to accompany me on that day, she was the most likely, but I hadn't even hinted to her that I was considering this. She would have pounced on the entire endeavour, made herself part of it, taken it away from me-as if it were all about her. A continuation ofthat first day in the coffee shop when she so brazenly showed me the man in the newspaper wearing the shirt and said that it would look good on me. Just because she saw in me and said out loud what was there, but what I was afraid to acknowledge. Just because having had to face it once it had been named I came to want the shirt first, and then much more than the shirt. So, naturally,

49 I didn't call upon her to go to the hospital with me. But, in truth, I felt unusually brave, like a soldier alone in the trenches. I hate clichés, but there is something bracing and at once satisfying to have the kind of experience that makes you understand that you come into this world alone, and you die alone. You die alone, and are reborn alone. I sort of died, and was reborn, you see. What is satisfying is the knowledge that it is not only possible to experience the highs and lows of life all by one's self, but that even when one is alone, one is not denied these highs and lows.

That morning, I tell Jonathan, deciding that once and for all I will tell him everything, for who knows if there will be another visit here with me, that morning, I say, heading to St. Michael's Hospital I thought of Safi. He breathes long and slow. It is a barley veiled show of exasperation. No, no; it's not like that; Safi is different, I tell him as if I had been caught and must explain. I was thinking of her, that she never had the opportunity to experience such temperatures, and wished that she could have known this firsthand even for five minutes. She would have said, "But, Sid, you are brave . How can you live in a place like this?" And it would have been a testament to my mettle. Even though I had been in Canada for thirty years, the same thought, without fail, came to mind whenever it got that way: I wish Safi, I wish my mother, I wish my father, I wish-and then there'd be a string of names of other people who likely didn't hold me in their thoughts for a second, but who had left some mark on me that made me want to prove my worth. The weather was not by any means all that tested a person's character in that complex, confusing country of yours, Jonathan, but it's the one thing every single person in your country has in common.

But Safi was the one who was brave.

In that sea of cold, the wet whiteness ofthat morning, a different kind of quiet came to my mind- that other kind that wished for and willed the unexpected howl of a monkey--the quiet of bird noises

50 echoing throughout the cool stillness of Tucker Valley in the Chaguaramas foothills. In that cold, I thought always of this heat. And, look, sitting here in this heat and mundane quiet, facing this warm salty GuIf, I think of the rumble of city noise that used to waft in from the downtown core and from the Don Valley Parkway just over from where I lived. I can still hear the frenetic howls and roars of fire trucks, ambulances and police cars. A rash of electrical current, memory and reality, heat and cold, spread under the epidermis of the cheeks of my face and then from the base of my skull, up my chest and down to the small of my back. The sizzle and hum that came from the light of the street lamp overhead as it trembled coursed through my own body. Safi had said to me, but you made over there your home now, forget about here when you're there, you can't live in two places—it's like having two masters-you have to give up one. At first she tried to understand my. ambivalences, my perennial disquiet, but she gave up, chiding me for being a "No-whereian" as she put it, and telling me to return to Trinidad, or forget about it once and for all and settle into the Toronto landscape. She wasn't so much sick of hearing about it, as she was worried that I couldn't be happy in this constant state of not belonging. She wanted me to be happy. It was not easy for her to have come into a life of luxury while I had given mine up for not much that was discernable. A clear line between here and there never existed. Both were forever present. And it is so, even now, Jonathan, there when I'm here, here when I'm there. It's natural for immigrants. The last time Safi and I were together was here, in Trinidad. My parents were still alive, but I didn't tell them that I was coming. She was having some sort of hard time-she herself wasn't able to figure out what was going on in her own life, but she was wistful and depressed, and so I came especially to see her. I stayed in the guest room of her house that is not far from here. Her husband still lives in that big house, what we call here a "maco" house. The kind of house built for show. One day, we drove-well, she did the driving as usual-into Chaguaramas and up the quiet, lush Tucker Valley. It was five or so in the evening. The sun was moving west fast, and we

51 left knowing full well that it would be dark getting back. Two of us driving on a forest road, alone, at that time of night. But we weren't alone, we were together, and when Safi and I were together we were, or so we imagined, invincible, carefree, and daring. Not daring of us, but of others. Just you dare—you wouldn't know what hit you! Ours was the only car for a good distance into the Valley, and then suddenly up about a hundred yards ahead in our lane there was a small white car stopped on the road, and another, white, too, in the on-coming lane facing us, and also stopped. They had effectively blocked the road. That both cars were white seemed an unlikely coincidence, and therefore meaningful. San was telling me about Cynthia her maid. Cynthia had answered an ad she had placed in the paper, and when Cynthia saw the house, when she met Safi, and met the four children, Safi didn't have a chance to interview her. Cynthia just said, "I am taking this job. I will start right away. Show me my room." Safi was saying that by the time we got back Cynthia would have made coconut bake and salt fish, and that she was real good, by which, she added, she meant that Cynthia, who was black, didn't make bake like an Indian, bake, that is, that flops like wilted celery in your hand. Cynthia's was the real thing. Hers, you can actually taste the coconut, and the triangle of it is firm- firm, and meets you, when you hold it up to your mouth, like a man. She laughed when she had said this and looked at me, but although I was hearing her words and felt myself react, all defensive as if she were making some comment about me, all I could focus on was the fact that the two cars, both of them small and white, two cars that were so alike, had stopped, in that particular configuration, and that there was bush on either side of the road and ravines that might have been dry, but they were too deep and narrow for a car to get out if it went in, and that we would have no choice but to stop when she arrived at the two cars, and I was remembering my father, and so many others, saying if you're the only one on a Trinidad road and someone tries to stop you, even if they hit your car, or you hit someone on the road, don't stop, for god's sake don't stop-just drive straight to the police station, and

52 I was thinking that the police station would have been in the other direction, way behind us and I don't know where exactly, and noticing that the sun had already gone down behind the hills and all that dense greenery was losing its lushness and definition, and that there was no way to turn around, and that the forest had fat, long poisonous snakes, and that people weren't just mugged in this country, but raped, and murdered, or kidnapped and then raped and murdered. And then I realized what Safi said about Cynthia's bake, so firm it met you like a man, and although I kept looking at the situation ahead, curious that it didn't seem to unduly perturb Safi-she had continued driving forward, a little slower, but without hesitation~I shook my head in feigned irritation, but I didn't take her bait, for the slyness of the smile she wore indicated that she was indeed baiting me. She added that one thing Cynthia could do, is cook Creole food. I was looking hard to see if the people in the two cars were communicating with each other, and she saw my concentration and she said, but what these people think they are doing? They can't just stand up like that in the middle of the road. How do they expect me to pass? They are going to have to move. And just as she said that, as if they heard, they began to move, the one in our lane carrying on now abruptly and swiftly, the one approaching moving more slowly, the driver peering off into the field to his left even as he was rolling forward. You said, Safi, I mean, she said they must have seen some animal or other. I recalled now that one blue-tinted summer day, cold still hanging in the air, I was driving on the dizzyingly beautiful Icefields Parkway between Banff and Jasper. I had been courting, and been courted on that drive by a chain of gleaming glaciers on the western side of the highway, and smooth faced glacier-carved mountains on the East. On the west, the side with the postcard views, there were deceptively tempting rivers. That landscape-sky cloud glacier tarn rock lake river glacial silt summer wild flowers-was a canvas of shades of blue, bluish white, white and blue, turquoise and white and cream, creamy yellow and lavender and violet- went on and on, and it was the kind of beauty that you never got tired of it, but as kilometers of

53 highway were rapidly eaten up with your inevitable momentum forward you knew it would soon come to an end, and you were anticipating the end, unwittingly willing it so that your disappointment that that indisputable godly beauty had indeed ended could be had and done with. In the wide shallow turquoise rivers you could see in some parts flat smooth pebbles the size of a fist underneath, and other parts were milky, opaque just inches below the surface, and there were rivers that were deep and tumultuous, and had rocks overgrown with mosses and delicate wild flowers trembling in the icy winds on their banks. I had been driving north of Sunwapta Pass with the raging waters of the Athabasca River seen through what Safi mischievously called over here, Christmas trees. And then, too soon, the inevitable-I arrived on the relatively flat portion of number 93 closer to the town of Jasper. As I came around a bend, I saw that SUVs, RVs and smaller cars that had been traveling in both directions had stopped rather haphazardly-some right there on the highway itself causing a back- up of cars, and some had pulled onto the shoulder, and some had even driven their SUVs down into the gullies, and people were standing about in groups, all looking to one side. I immediately thought it was either a black or cinnamon bear or a moose, as elk and deer were too commonly seen to cause such a to-do. I knew it wasn't an accident as people stood about too leisurely, as if at the zoo. Many sported cameras with animal viewing type lenses, those ultra long telephoto lenses, held up to their eyes-so perhaps it was, after all, not just an elk, but a herd of them, or a mother and her calf, or two males locking racks. I inched the car forward through the space available between the ill-parked vehicles, and peered in the direction of everyone's attention. To my horror, not twenty meters away, a grizzly foraged-it might have looked, to a person who wanted to give it human qualities-like it had lost its watch, or a ring, or a tooth, and was sniff-sniff-sniffing the ground assiduously. For days after, I checked the news, print and TV, to see if anyone had been mauled by the road-side grizzly.

54 Once the two cars moved off and I realized that the constant state of fear that people seem to be in- keep the car doors locked, and the windows up, don't go here, don't go there, keep your eyes and ears open, don't stop and chat with strangers—a new courage had come over me. I asked Safi to turn off the air-conditioning so that we could open the windows and listen. She smiled so broadly, pleased that that landscape still thrilled me. The valley was still well preserved. Its destruction for profit hadn't happened yet. When I think back on it now, we were in a sea of lime-greens, a thousand shades, from the darkest to the palest shades of lime green. A flat field of low growth, a mix of uncultivated grasses, and patches of bhaji and ofpigeon peas that extended well back to a middle ground of teak, papaya trees, breadfruit, trees with broad leaves. And rising, quite suddenly, behind that the Northern Range. Steep, dense, dark, and yet a burst of a quick line, a dash of bright red. The chaconia. A small sign posted that we were entering the park of Macaripe Beach. Safi looked at her watch and said, "It's still early. She won't have dinner ready yet. When was the last time you went to Macaripe Beach?" I said I had never been, and you—forgive me, Jonathan, it is as if she is here with me, with us—Safi accelerated, saying that we couldn't reach this far and not see it. The sky was turning yellowish, which indicated that sunset was near. I didn't want to be worried and afraid, and hesitant and missing out because of this. So, I said nothing. We came to a place where there was a guard's hut on the side of the road, a gate that could be raised and lowered across the road, and a sign that warned that at six pm the gate closed, at which time all persons must have vacated the park. It was quarter to six. There was no one in the hut. Safi stopped the car, and asked, you think they mean it? I laughed. Behind us came a car and as it was passing us you—Safi-put her hand out to stop it. She said to the driver, "The sign says the park closes at 6. You know if they serious? And the woman in the passenger seat laughed, the man driving said, No, it don't have nobody that does come and check. The woman said, I coming here plenty and I never yet see nobody in that hut. They drove on, the man shouting back, doh fraid, follow

55 us, we going for a swim. Safi asked me, You want to take a chance? She drove on. The field ended and suddenly the forest was right up against us. Tall dark forest trees met the road now. Suddenly, without any perceptible climb, we came to a small paved parking area. There was in it a handful of parked cars, and I was grateful for the presence of more than just one or two. A few people, men, women, children, milled about, some returning in wet bathing suites to their cars, some preparing to head down to the beach. Before us, at the back of the car park that would hold about twenty cars, was the sudden, perpendicular rise of mountain. The first time I visited Calgary I drove west on the Number 1 with a couple of friends to the Rockies. Immediately out of Calgary, the highway took its time undulating in small, almost imperceptible rises and dips that would not have been noticeable to anyone unless they, like me, were aware of the geographical designation of the area as prairie. It was supposed to be flat, flat, flat, like a table. Although I could look around 360 degrees and see in the far distance horizon meeting sky, uninterrupted by buildings or trees, or even big rises in the land, I was disappointed because I wanted to travel on land that was as flat as everyone said the prairies were. But then, half an hour or so into the drive, what I had thought was a bank of heavy white clouds on the horizon directly ahead began to solidify and the white puffmess took on some angularity, and in no time it was as if a jagged line of a trillion peaks of varying heights had slowly developed out of clouds, and now fringed the horizon. In time the mass before me stretched on either side of the vista ahead, as far as I could see. What enthralled me then was how I could watch, second by second my slow but steady, paced, slide from prairie, to the hillier but still gentle foothills, and then into a slit of highway in between mountain range and peaks that hemmed me in so that in the front, at the back, and the sides, the mountain vista after mountain vista presented themselves. But on this drive there had been an immediacy of forest-like vegetation from the moment we entered the Tucker Valley that developed in no time into jungle. In the Macaripe Bay area, the masses of tree, even different species, butted against

56 each other, towered and blocked out what was meters ahead. Safi drove into the small lot and all at once we arrived at a dead end, a natural wall of land that rose so high into the sky that when you looked up to see its top you lost your sense of balance. The face of it was embroidered with an infinite variety of different shades and shapes of dark green-the foliage of chaconia, baliser, balata, wild palms, silk cotton, vegetal tentacles waving out from the face of the wall, linked together by nets of wild monstera delisiosa vines. It was a bit frightening, being so suddenly and unexpectedly halted, and this added to the sense of danger in what Safi and I, two women from 'nice' families, were doing out here on our own, so late in the evening. To our left was the sea. The parking area was hemmed in by mountain and tall forest trees, and so was dark. There was a narrow view to the sea, and the light on the seaside of the mountains was startling. It was still bright light, daylight, out there. The water seemed far down, a bit of a drop. I asked cautiously, are there stairs? Safi answered, Well these people must be getting down somehow. I hadn't known this side of her. The adventurous side. We parked and got out. The back of the paved area rose, an almost vertical wall of mountain. An actual flange of the Northern Range. The sun was slipping down the sky fast. Between the trees sky was visible without a whiff of cloud nearby, and at that time of the evening you could look up at it for a good two or three seconds without the brightness searing your eyes. We found a perfectly constructed concrete stairway and went down, passing people returning to their vehicles. But others were coming past us as if in a hurry. The stairs made a 90-degree turn and then stretched out in a gentler angle to the bay. It was a small bay, with no real beach to speak off. Small waves rolled in and broke tightly, in quick succession. The man and the woman who had spoken to us from their car were already standing in the water, the woman in a dress, the skirt of which she had gathered tight around her and pulled up into a knot in front of her, the man in navy blue pants that reached his knees, the hem of the pants wet from the leaping water. We were close enough and the man said, you make it in time to see the sun. Safi

57 answered back in her usual fashion, Yes, you know how to give directions. His wife turned and grinned. He laughed and said, well it was a straight road, no turn-offs, you couldn't get lost if you tried. Safi answered, well, you know, I always try, but you right, I can't seem to get lost. The woman turned back, and then the man, looking at Safi, then at me, then back at Safi, the grin a little smaller on his face, but there, nevertheless. The bay was hemmed in by mountain on two sides, by the little walled-off platform on which we stood, and out ahead by an arm of neighbouring Venezuela which sprawled into view along a part of the horizon, and that land, and that horizon across that evening's calm water seemed entirely reachable. Not a speck was visible on the water, no barge, no ship, no pirogue. The sun would soon drop right down and I realized that this small bay presented the perfect audience for the staging of yet another photogenic Trinidadian sunset. Clearly, this was already well known to the people there. Several had cameras at the ready. As usual, for no reason other than a benevolent thoughtlessness, neither Safi nor I had walked with a camera. No picture of us together, as adults, had ever been taken. This I regret.

She and I stood side-by-side watching. We didn't speak. The sun's angle had thrown a harsh glint on the surface of the trees' mass, on the leaves trembled shards of sliver slight, but these sharp jewels had thrown the foliage and the matter immediately behind into blackness. It was like a message: don't look here, look out, ahead, where the real drama of the moment is. I turned to look at a woman and her two children posing, their backs to the drama, being photographed by a man, possibly her husband, or partner. Safi wasn't distracted and kept looking out. I wondered what the moment meant to her. Once when I visited San Diego I had gone in the evening to a park on the water to see the sun go down, and there were people supplicating, performing yoga positions, offering their faces and flowers, so earnestly awaiting the moment of the sun's touching the horizon, and then they seemed to become at peace and held that peace until the very last fragment of sun had, just before it disappeared, turned

58 blood black, and on disappearing, as if it had burst under the horizon, a brownish red and burnt orange rash spread rapidly across the sky. I had felt like an outsider watching them as much as the sky, but not participating in any ritual. Then as I stood behind Safi, Safi so quiet, I was moved to use the moment, as if there were some magic in it, to commit to something, or to ask for something, but I got distracted and watched the children's antics as they assumed that they were being photographed, and the mother, who knew that the point of the photograph was the action of the heavens behind them, and their presence was a little incidental. The father, or partner, or brother-the man-was laughing with the children, but he was trying in earnest to, to encourage them to behave, to be still. Then he got animated, and said, "Now!" And took the picture. I looked ahead and saw that the sun had already hit the water, and that Safi's eyes were fiercely set on the point ahead. She was calm, and serious, not unlike the sun worshipers I had seen in San Diego. I didn't know this side of her. I wondered what it was that she saw, what was in her mind. It wasn't in the end a very dramatic sunset, and we turned our attention to the scene more immediately around us. With our back now to the horizon, the harsh sun light gone and what of the now watered down sunset remained behind us, the trees were strangely in sharp focus, a kinder light opening up what lay between the surface greenery and behind it. What a surprise, a gift it was, to realize that the hills on either side of the bay were splashed generously with chaconia, obliterated earlier by that harsh light, sweeping arms of redness reaching outward as if to fan the bay. And the sky, a post-sunset sky, was the most luminescent shade of pthalo blue I had ever seen. We stood staring up and Safi gripped my arm, pointed to the sky over the area of the parking lot, and said, How strange. So blue after sunset. And what a strange shade of blue. I saw what she saw, but was watching to make sure that her touching of my arm had gone unnoticed by the strangers around us. I stepped forward, moved slightly out of her reach, and said, It's the colour of the sea around Barbados. She asked, do you know what makes the sky blue? I opened my eyes wide in encouragement, and she

59 obliged, laughing, because she knew I was making gentle fun of her, and as she told me in detail the physics of the blue of the sky, I thought, you are the mother of three children, the wife of a business man, you are a business woman, you are a Trinidadian woman, you live here in this country, but who are you, really? She said, you're not listening to a thing I am telling you, are you. I said, and do you know what makes thunder? And as I told her, I could see that she was not listening to me, yet she looked at me and was grinning. I dared not take her hand, but I walked off in as casual a manner as I could, toward the stairs, back to where the car was parked.

I would have asked Safi to accompany me to St. Michael's Hospital. She would have come with me, I told Jonathan, and she would yet not have crowded me. She would not have tried to take over, even though it is because of her that I was able to do that. I made a gesture of fanning myself and said to Jonathan, rather frankly, for the time for guardedness was long over, she 'facilitated' this, all of this. I thought to myself, why aren't you here today, Safi?

60 Siddhani, Twenty Five Years Earlier

The pink and yellow lighting of Wascana Street is gone, replaced by a low sky overhead casting grayness over everything. River Street, and its sidewalks, as I thought, had already been ploughed. The bank of pushed-aside snow that formed a barrier between the sidewalk and the road is crowned by a newly dumped layer of snow and sludge mixed with broken slabs ofpacked ice from the city machines I heard clearing the sidewalk. When I am here in Toronto, that other place called Trinidad in which I was born and grew up and where you, Safi, are, is what gets called "home". When I am in Trinidad, when I am with you that is, or with my parents or with my sister-when I am in that land where my childhood bedroom is still intact, where coconut trees are a colour of yellow that only coconut trees are, and where the coconut branches scrape the roof of the house when it drags across it in the wind, that place where there are three ranges of rough green hills Trinidadian's call mountains, that place with forests and valleys across which parrots and parakeets lumber in something akin to primordial flight, where on evening the sky is a curtain of breezy red silk, where rice plains, sugar cane plains, swamp lands, rivers the colour of coffee with plenty, plenty milk, flow into each other, and the sea comes up on shore like an eager child scattering sea jewels about your feet, and then runs back like a mischievous child-when I am in Trinidad, I refer to here, my apartment on Wascana, the City of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, this country, Canada, as home. That time I was home, in Trinidad- not the last visit back, but one previous to that-the things we did, the way you were with me, me with you, brought me some understanding of why it is that in truth I have not settled here in Toronto, why it is that I have not been able to make a home and family here in this country, the kind of home that no matter where you go, no matter what pleasures being elsewhere brings, it is the one you look forward to returning to. Being with you made me understand why it is that, in spite of the fact ofthat little boy, Jonathan, I felt unfulfilled and alone with India. You made me see what it was that Michelle, and for

61 that matter, all the other women I dated in Canada, lacked. It is Jonathan I miss, not those women. I wonder how he is these days. You would have liked him. It is my fault that you are not here with me today, Safi, and I will forever be haunted by this. Thirty years we'd been the closest of friends, beginning the very first day of term in Lower Sixth when I transferred from my school to your school. If I could bring you back I would. I will, no matter how long it takes, find some way to make amends.

I have the letters with me, Safi. My constant reminder. The girls, including you, from the class I was to enter had lined the corridor to the Lower Sixth A room. As the year progressed that corridor became less never-ending than it seemed that day. It had been made, too, on that particular day, narrower by girl after girl lining it on either side, the crisp starched white shirts that were divided neatly in two by the line of a blue tie down the chest, the dark blue immaculately pleated skirts, and the heavy black socks and shoes, the pairs of dark brown legs at such ease, all making the morning hotter than mornings in this verdant hill-side paradise for a school environment should have been. I found it rather strange that all the legs were brown, and quite dark too, save for one. That girl was of Chinese origin. The others were mostly of Indian descent or of African, or they were mixed, the Indian and African in them more prominent than whatever other ethnicity they could claim. There were no pairs of white legs, and if all students were present at that time, there would be no white girls in my class. At the convent at least a third of any class would be made up of local whites. I had the most peculiar reaction to this then, hidden of course, but I was aware of it. There was, for the first time, a situation where I was not in the middle. I could well be the one on top. I had not understood then, the full implication of this sense, but it was a powerful, ticklish sensation, and it got me through the initial disdain that was hurled my way. Some of you had leaned one shoulder into the wall, a hip jutted out, others had their upper backs against the wall, braced by one leg bent at the knee, a foot flat against the wall. Their hands covered their mouths as they spoke into them, some of you had your mouths to the ears of

62 others, and all eyes were trained on me as I passed, the shoosh shoosh shoosh of whispered judgments falling on my back and shoulders like light belt straps, yet I managed the performance of a brave smile. I had thought then that the line-up was to see me—not to welcome me, but to see who this new student entering Naparima Girls' High School in the last two years of higher secondary school was. But I learned the very next morning that this was the ritual, the way you~we~got ready before entering the classrooms. The teacher who walked ahead of me laughed—and I suppose it was this laughter and the comment that followed was what contributed to making me feel that you had congregated in this manner to see me. "OK", the teacher said, "Enough of this. You all behave yourselves." Had there been some response to her admonishment, some hint might have been given as to what behaving yourselves in such a situation could mean. But no one budged. At my other school, every girl would have straightened herself—if she had dared present herself like these girls had in front of a teacher in the first place. Behind my smile, my heart had stopped beating. The classroom was empty. Mrs. Augusta walked me to the desk that was assigned to me. She called out, Safiya, you. Come here, please. Introduce yourselves. I hadn't noticed you out there as Mrs. Augusta and I walked down that aisle. I hadn't looked at anyone directly, hadn't picked out any faces. You said I am. . . and I either didn't hear or you purposely said it so that I wouldn't catch it, and I had to ask you to please repeat it, and you said your name, Safiya, loudly and slowly with emphasized irritation, your eyes boring into me. There was even a daring in your voice. Comment on it, just go ahead, I dare you, I heard. My comment, had I dared, might have been, Oh, that's new. Muslim? I said my name, adding, pleased to meet you. If eyebrows raised could smirk, yours did. I had been one of the more popular girls in my other school, and even before the bell rang, I was already feeling quite disheartened, and learning fast that the niceties that earned points at the Convent school were held in disdain here. Mrs. Augusta let out a sigh of exasperation and said, "Come now, enough. I am going to leave it to you to

63 show Siddhani around. I expect you to help her with any and everything she needs. If you're unable don't ask any of the other young ladies to help you out, come directly to me." You sucked your teeth, but only enough to be able to get away with it, and said," Oh gosh, Miss. Why me?" Mrs. August simply said, "OK, stop the theatrics now, and behave like a proper young lady."

You boldly answered back, "You mean, even if I am not?"

Mrs. August looked at you sternly, but she said nothing. I have to say, I was impressed. That sort of backchat would have been enough for detention where I was coming from.

When Mrs. August left, you faced me with suspicion and the readiness to disbelieve anything I uttered. You smirked, "So, you got expelled, or what?"

The line-up of girls outside, awaiting the school bell before entering the classroom was intimidating, and so were you, even though I felt myself already, perversely, drawn to you. "No. I want to do art but it isn't being offered at my other school, so I got a transfer here." It irked me that my tone sounded pleading, if only slightly so. You stared hard. You were two or three inches shorter than 1. 1 could not read your silence. Then, in a flash you spurted with equal measure accusation and caution:

"Likely story. You see those girls out there? They will find out the truth about you in no time. So no point lying."

I so wanted you, if not the others-the desire to conquer my adversary learnt early as a survival maneuver-to believe me. My composure thankfully remained steady and I stated flatly, without irritation or fear:

"There is nothing to find out. I am telling you the truth."

64 I could read the space between your eyes instantly. You were curious, and I was disarming you too soon for your liking. I was as amused as I was disappointed, at how easy this had been.

You would not take your eyes away from mine, and I could feel mine tickling with discomfort. You raised your hand to touch my arm, and I felt triumph wash over me. But instead of a friendly touch you pinched my skin. I had never performed such a maneuver before, and so surprised myself when I flipped up that same arm, my hand at your wrist in no time, and I gripped it hard. I said, in a soft voice, "Don't do that." There was no smile on my face now. But that was when your austerity broke, and you were suddenly grinning. In my grip of your wrist I felt your body relax. My grip relaxed then too, but I did not let go off your hand. I remained, however, unsmiling, suddenly frightened, but not of you.

Cold from the Lake blows in and concentrates, as usual, along River Street. It is boring through my forehead, right into my skull. My brain would freeze, I am certain, if my head were not covered. And yet, there is a girl~I can't call her a woman, she looks some days~I see her out here often--as if she is no older than 10 years, and other days she looks like a 13 year old who has already experienced the gamut of life's offerings, from celebration to disappointment, the latter winning out, giving her the dubious air of being a woman, force-ripe, you'd call her back home-not only wearing no hat, but wearing a white jacket, a vice in which her body is gripped, held by a zipper done up only until just in line with the apex ofher breasts. There is a collar ofblond faux fur. She could pull that zipper all the way up to protect her chest. The fur would then be drawn closer all around her neck, but that thin neck, her bare chest, and that not-quite adult décolletage are bait for work. The jeans she wears, giving perfect view of her exposed belly button and her meager, imperfect legs, cannot possibly afford her any warmth. She wears running shoes. She is smoking, striking a pose to catch the eye of every driver

65 that passes. She had looked at me, and because I was looking back at her she primped her pose, weight on one leg, then transferred to the other, then undid it, and struck it up again, and once again she undid it, as she tried to make out if I might be a potential customer. It took her a while, and I could see her confusion, but she realized eventually that I am not what she is courting, and she ignores me now. I've often wondered if I were to approach one of these girls, one of these women, if once I got close to them, and they saw my slight eyebrows, and heard my voice, if they'd brush me off, cuss me upside down, or simply have the attitude that work is work. A yellow cab with its rooftop light lit up to indicate that it is available slushes down toward Queen. The driver slows as he passes me, turns his head and catches my eyes with his. He must have sensed that tiny percentage of me that still wonders if walking is what I really want to be doing on a day like this one. I cross the street, even though when I reach Shuter I will have to cross back over. Even though it is early morning and the residents of the two houses I am avoiding will likely be asleep. Even if they aren't up and about and causing some kind of small, yet fearful trouble, the air around them and their belongings, I am certain of it, is stagnant and bereft of life force. One of the two motorized wheel chairs that belong there is on its side in the snow, to one side of the wood ramp that leads to the town house door. The small piece of their property between the sidewalk and the close wall of their house, is crammed with metal chairs, garbage and recycling bins, and a long metal box like the kind that the City uses in parks to store small equipment. There is a propane barbeque outfit tied with a thick iron chain to the fence that separates this house from the one next to it. Even in deep winter the two women and the two men who live in this house find themselves out on the sidewalk in front of their house, the women perching on the wheelchairs, and they scream what sound like insults at each other and at the world, long into the night. Last Halloween, I was coming home after midnight after partaking in delightful wildness of Church Street, and as I passed this house out of which a party had spilled well onto the sidewalk, a

66 man began to pelt hand launched fireworks across the street. A whizzing whistle arched high into the night, a bang that reverberated in the valley that was the narrow street between the residential houses, and then hot on the heels of the menacing sound was a scooting procession of electric red and blue star lights that burst to life, outed, and were resurrected, a trillion flashes stripping right across the street and onto the lawns of the houses on the far side. I held my breath and waited, wondering what would happen if a person were hit by one of these fire crackers. Two of the women started screaming at the firecracker launcher who was howling with pleasure, "You fucking asshole, you crazy or what? Cut it out." When, immediately following the last, another one whizzed into the air, and the sound of the man's delight followed it, one of the women, looking across the road at me then back at him in the window, screamed, "Cut it out right now, you crazy son of a bitch, or I'll come in there and beat your brains in". I stood, trying to seem calm, as if these things were natural, and one only had to be patient, and wait one's turn to continue on down the sidewalk, but I didn't look over at them as I didn't want to be dragged into any conspiracy or camaraderie. In the summer time that household stays up all night long acting out variations on their theme, but in the daytime it is dead quiet. Still, a fear of them permeates the air.

Safi, I wonder how you'd have responded if I were to have told you that I have dreams, as recently as just a few days ago, of you and me having sex? Surely, if I have such dreams of us, you did, too. I simply can't have created this complex cement between us by myself.

When I lived in Trinidad—and when I return now the same holds true-people from my family's social world didn't walk as a means of commuting. They drove or were driven even if to visit a neighbor just down the road. In between houses, neighbourhoods, shopping centres were large swathes of undeveloped land, usually overgrown with guava trees, tall rozay bushes, dense mango trees, the

67 growth spilling off the land and encroaching on the streets and roads. Walking would have been dangerous, as one would have had to walk right in the path of cars. Today no one I know walks because of the crime, of the number of muggings, robbings, kidnappings. This neighbourhood often feels threatening to me, but there is ample sidewalk edging every street, no uncontrolled floral growth on the few spots of undeveloped land that seem as if they are merely in waiting, and building after building giving the sense of a well peopled world where crime was unlikely to jump on you as you walked by. It took a while for me to feel comfortable walking on the streets, to not fear the possibility of danger everywhere. I take the risk here, because of the profusion of concrete, and the held -back greenery, but I remain cautious when at home, and rightly so, of course. Once, you'll remember, you asked me if there was anything I really wanted to do-well, I admit you ask this every time I come home-but I am thinking ofthat time when I said that it had been about 30 years since I had been to see the turtles lay their eggs on Matura Beach, and I'd love to go there again. I said it because it was true, because it was something I had longed to do but because of the crime and kidnappings and murders, and the idea-real and imagined-that Indian families are targeted in these crimes, no one from my own family would go. Southerners! Southern Indian Trinidadians! Afraid and overly cautious on one hand, and the most hospitable people anywhere, on the other. They live in self-made prison- high walled compounds in communities scattered about the edges of San Fernando, Fyzabad, Siparia, Princess Town and elsewhere. They-yes, they—I am not from there anymore-they move about in packs of the nuclear family, and of the extended family. They will invite you to visit them, and the instant you enter their compound they will fete so well, like you've never been feted before, that you wouldn't want to leave, or you will be looking out for their next invitation, guarding your place at their table-like one dog next to another dog, both hearing the rattle of the bone, smelling the meat on it above the counter-but they are afraid to leave their own houses and may well not allow you to return

68 the favour. But, Safi, you moved up in life. You moved to the north and adopted a northern-style sense of freedom. You mix with blacks easily. You walk on the streets of Port of Spain, Frederick, Henry, Ariapita, in Woodbrook and in St. James, careful of your handbag certainly, but not paranoid that you will any minute be mugged, robbed, or kidnapped. You drive downtown and across the country—when you come to see me for instance in San Fernando—by yourself late at night, and late at night you actually stop when the traffic light turns red, not in the least cowed by the possibility of bandits in waiting near streetlights. Still, I was shocked when you said, all right, you'd make some calls, get the permits from the Forestry Division, and locate a tour company to take; us. We'd have to arrive at the beach at about 9 pm and we'd be out there until just before the sun comes up, because that was the window of time in which the turtles came ashore, so, I thought by us you meant you, Reggie, your sons Paul and Simon, and, of course, me. But us-at that time of night, of morning, in that remote area on the north east coast of the island, was you and me. What is it about Reggie that made him the way he is, a man who would allow such a thing of his wife? Does this make him a bad husband, or a fine one? Is anything as simple as this? But Reggie is another story, not one I want to ponder here.

We piled into the back of a pick-up truck, no seat belts, sitting on the hard ridged floor of the cab with three tourists from Germany, four Americans, a British couple, and five other Trinidadians. The smell of gasoline mixed with coconut flavoured sunscreen, and citronella. You had brought a blanket. On the Beetham Highway you threw the blanket over our jeans clad legs. We hugged our knees to our chests to make room for us all. As the truck pelted down the Beetham, jostled by its weaving in and out of the traffic we swayed in unison, sometimes bumping out of time into each other, pressing against each other and the passengers on the other sides of us to brace on a hard turn. The air smelled of salt from the sea on the other side of the Highway, ofbrackish water soured in the mangrove swamp that edged the roadway, and of burning rubbish from the dumps along the thoroughfare. The sky over the

69 mangrove danced in orange light from the setting sun, and competed with the orange of the fires we caught glimpses of in between the land mounds, and the mangrove. It was unusual to pass this way without the seclusion and comfort afforded in an air-conditioned car. But it wasn't hot at this time of the night, and sitting in the back of a truck flying down the Highway had our hair whipping about our faces, and as the sun went down and the sky turned blood brown, and in no time sudden blackness crept over, and one star followed another and suddenly the blackness was punctured by a trillion points of shimmering silver light, and it had gotten cool, the exposed back of my neck, my upper arms were as cool as they would get on an early fall evening in Toronto.

The sidewalk is icy and unevenly cleared in parts, and I have to wonder if this is bravery or stupidity, two sides of one coin, and if someone else—someone else right here in this city—might judge that what I am doing, walking in this weather to this appointment is normal or not normal. Perhaps, perhaps not, and this appointment is all about normal and not normal, two of my least favourite words. I would ban them, banish them from usage, from language itself, if I had that kind of power. But, perhaps walking in the snow and cold today will be something to brag about one day. I might take some pride in telling someone-a lover, perhaps-that I walked in a snowstorm, to this appointment, on my own. The cab passes, sounding as if the sludge of snow on the road is holding back its progress down the street. I feel slightly light-headed, the effect of not eating. It requires no small energy to walk in snow and cold.

A man dressed in cold weather bicycling gear hunches over a bicycle that is equipped with fat tires. He labours through thick brown slush water, the water slapping along with him, a dark skunk line running up his behind.

70 How is it possible that one could be light-headed, feel fear and so much loss, and be brimming with anticipation, all at once?

The man on the bicycle, he hadn't decided not to ride today.

My knapsack, a forest-green waterproof day pack from Mountain Equipment Co op, containing one large manila envelope with two sacks of cash, a change of clothing, toiletries, a note book and pens, and a elastic band-bound bundle of every single letter you ever wrote me, is secure on my back. I have tugged for the umpteenth time to make sure, and I have made sure, too, that the belt is locked around my waist, and I continue to plod diligently onward. I bend my head down against the cold wind and hold the front of the coat's hood down. My eyes well with cold-temperature and wind-induced tears. With my free hand I reach up under my glasses and wipe one eye and then the other. I pull the front of the wool scarf that is wound about my neck up over my nose, and take in for some brief seconds the warmth it traps from my breath, but almost immediately minute beads of condensed breath spread on the scarf unpleasantly dampening it and my skin, wet errant wool threads clinging to my skin and finding their way into my mouth. I shove my hands back into my down coat. New tears are already brimming. One eye always water more than the other in cold wind. I pull one hand out, and slip its blunt arrowed tip under my glasses again and wipe, this time harder. I press the lid ofthat eye down, and move my hand, pressed like that, to the inner corner of my eye, as if doing so would force out all the remaining tears. I bend into the wind that sweeps up and down the street, and walk briskly toward Shuter. Someone, I don't remember who, now, told me about an old man who had died alone in his row house and for eighteen months he wasn't missed? It wasn't until he had won a Publisher's Weekly sweepstake worth over fifteen million dollars and the sweepstake people and the television camera were at his door that it was realized that he was dead. I don't for the life of me remember who told me

71 this story, but I remember the story well. The neighbour, seeing the man's mail piling up, began stealing it. Regularly, in his mail would be letters from Publishers Weekly with fake cheques made out to him for SlOO, 000 and a note saying that that was how close he had come to winning, and encouraging him to enter one more time. The neighbour began to fill out the forms in his name, and sent them in, and Publishers Weekly began to include the man's name in special draws designed for their preferred customers. She told the police that she believed that if her—well, it was in his name- number ever came up that he would share the money with her as she had done the work with great persistence. The Publisher's Weekly folk arrived at the man's door and from the state of the yard and the back of the house, they realized something was amiss, and one thing led to another and, however it was that they did these things, it was determined that the man had died 18 months before, and not a soul had gone to check up on him, or had wondered where he had gotten to. His phone, electricity, hydro, were long cut, and fingers were shaken at the city for not having wondered or cared, but the main tragedy that everyone dwelt on was that no one had bothered to come looking for this man, and what he could have done with such money.

Mere steps now before Shuter Street. I'll cross at the traffic light, and on the other side I'll be out of the wind, and I could take my time getting to this appointment I have so long imagined, finally made real through something bigger than your generosity. It began, the imagining and dreaming and wishing and knowing, before that day you pinched my arm and I grabbed your wrist and told you not to do that, and felt the power and the fear. It had nothing to do with the fact that Vasanth got to go with his friends to cricket test matches but I wasn't allowed to go with them, or to even suggest going with my own friends, of which I had few, to be honest. Vasanth would say, don't be stupid, Dhan. Your friends' parents aren't going to allow them to go. What sort of girls go liming like that alone? What do you know about cricket anyway? And when I protested that you're not alone when you're with a

72 bunch of girls, and that there are women's cricket teams, and that at my all-girls school we play cricket, he would get on his high horse and tell me that I was just a child, that I knew nothing, but that didn't make me want to be an adult. Neither did it have anything to do with what Uncle Nehan used to do to me, when my parents left us in his care, and what he used to make me do to him, him telling me to be quiet about all of this or else. It began long before all of that. In fact, it never actually began. It just was. Always was. You see, Safi, the reason I found it so hard to talk with you about all of this, even when you kept asking me, kept on and on and on, asking, pushing me to tell you how I got this way, to tell you what 'made me so', is because you asked me this as you held my face in both your hands, and searched every centimeter of my face with eyes that were like fingers, eyes that were like lips. Regardless of what was happening inside of you, you knew full well that you were not at all like me. You could touch my face, and look at me like that, and yet not be like me. What fortune, and luxury. Ain't nothing wrong with me-so said the psychiatrist, to which you were quiet for the longest while, and I wondered if it was because you thought, surely he is wrong, or if it was because you were reflecting on what this meant for me, feeling how crushing it was to be told, no, you're quite sane. Could it really be so that the lifelong journey that has pulled me to this point, will end simply because I arrived at a building, at a door, at a reception room, with a bag full of cash? Dreaming of this day has come to define me so entirely, and I wonder when the dream has come true, if I will be able to put an end to this particular dreaming.

OK, so if I want to feel my little hard-on while walking here out in the cold, and feel this body lift off the ground and float and shiver and tickle like crazy, all I have to do is recall the two of us in the car, parked, the engine cut, just off the golf course road. The car was the only source of light, until you switched them off. I noticed first the sudden silence, no shushing sound of cars in the distance, no drone of planes like I would have heard had I been in the wilderness of British Columbia, reminding

73 always that no matter how far away we think we might have got we were never really all that alone. The quiet was stunning at first. It was as if I had put my head in a glass jar and sealed around it. Then I heard sounds, forest sounds. The bellbird's tock. If ever a tock could be mournful, there it was. Monkey's howling. The wind in the trees. And off, a little distance away, something big high in the trees fall, and in mid fall we could hear it caught, or perhaps it caught itself, and in my imagination its sounds translated to wings that flapped frantically against branches and then an easier flapping as the thing, some big bird, an owl perhaps, righted itself and made away. We saw in the pitch black forest, a thousand pinpoints of light flashing erratically, and I whispered to you because I was afraid to disturb this real quiet, about the thieves who, long ago, used to collect fireflies in jars to make lanterns to light the way so that in the deep night they could creep into estates and steal the cacao. My story was eaten by the darkness and by the growing loudness of cicadas, and the pulsing competing croaking of a thousand bullfrogs surrounding the car. Then you answered. You said, why did you move off so quickly when I touched your arm?

And if I wanted to take that little thrill, that little hard on to some delightful place I would have to engage in my imagination some different follow-through from there, but, of course, what happened between us there in the car was quite different from what I often imagine.

What happened is that I didn't answer, so you said, I mean when I was showing you the colour of the sky after the sunset.

Yes, yes, I had said. I know when you're talking about.

I knew because your touch still hung in the air about me, and the feeling of instant panic and fear still throbbed in my chest, but now, like a plane in the distance.

74 So, why.

Eyes get used to this kind of darkness, eventually. I could see that you were looking directly at me. What are you doing, exactly what are you doing, I wondered.

Because of the way I look, I said hesitantly, deciding to take my risks here in this dark car, where I can't see the details of your face, nor you mine, and where this conversation might be swallowed by the forest, if the following day we would need it to have been so.

I continued to choose my words carefully, I know that I don't look like most women. I think other people see that. I just worry that they might not like to see any sort of closeness between someone like myself and a woman. Between you and me, I mean.

It was as if I was picking slippery words out of a stew with chopsticks.

It's a safety reflex. My safety, but more so yours, too. Those people down there, they don't know we've been friends forever. They don't know that we're like sisters. We're like sisters, aren't we?

I heard the rustle of your body as you moved in your seat, and felt your hand rest lightly on the back of my neck. I wished you hadn't done that. You rubbed my neck, and I wasn't sure what you meant by doing that.

But, Dhan, although you don't dress like women here, I think they might just read you as being a foreigner. Besides, you don't have the smallest boobs, you know. You laughed, scandalously it sounded in the quiet that had been holding our words until then, the quiet suddenly shattered. You know they give you away, don't you?

75 All my breath had been stolen from me. I shrank into the seat, and felt myself disappearing. There was brain enough still there in the car for it to mutter, "I hate them. They give me away as much as they save me".

To my horror you darted from your driver's seat and grabbed my body with both arms and pulled me close to you, holding me tight against you. I could feel my body again. I at first made it rigid and tried to engage my brain and this body in a step by step computing, an unraveling of what was happening, decisions coming slow about how to and how not to respond. I brought my arms lightly around you, my hands on your back, on the thin light fabric of your blouse, How easily it slid with the slightest shift of my hand. You are not like the women I have known in Canada. Your body was softer, less muscled, and I knew it was the kind of body that could, finally, catch me if, and when, I was falling. You pressed your cheek against mine. If there had been a person sitting in the back seat of the car, he or she wouldn't have heard you, but I did. "Dhani, I wish." I waited, and that wish hung in the air like a tiny filament of light, but you didn't finish what you were saying, at least not aloud, and I didn't-I couldn't-fmish it in my imagination. I couldn't because, I didn't dare. I know more than ever that it is cowards who don't dare. I don't know how I came to press my lips to your neck, but I did, and as you let me it seemed a small eternity. You moved unhurriedly back into your seat only when I released my arms from around you. Who was holding whom? And was this a holding, or a holding onto?

Do you know what you smell like? Skin just below the simmer of a Trinidadian sun.

I'm sorry, you whispered, and you fiddled with the keys in the ignition. You started up the car. You said, "Have you ever thought about." But you didn't finish. It took several minutes before you tried again. "Don't people, I mean people like you, don't they, isn't there some sort of operation?"

76 My face felt as if it caught on fire. "You know, this is really uncomfortable for me to talk about. Can we just skip it?"

I dreamt once that I was a little piece of thread that hardened into a filament of wire so fine I was practically invisible. I had existed for a long time inside of a blunt bump that was on the surface of something so big that I was unable to see it, and one day I punctured the bump, the pimple-like thing. I, the filament emerged, out of the bump, the pimple-like thing, and a crud of drying birth fluids clung along my short length. As I, this filament, lengthened, and this lengthening was happening rather swiftly~not really ever becoming anything other than what it was-a filament-those dried bits of crud dredged and trapped new crud along the way, and I, the filament, was suddenly longer than a tape measure, and weighed down and covered over by this accumulating gunk.

Within a half hour or so, this cruddy filament will arrive at what I think of as the eye of a needle though which it~the unrealized strand of me~will pass, and forty seven years of accumulated crud will be scraped off~or so I hope-and on the other side of the needle a person will emerge. I am on the brink of personhood. It is strange, and not entirely believable, that a journey that took, in the big sense of things, a lifetime, could so suddenly culminate, twenty minutes from now, simply by arriving at a door. It is strange, not entirely believable, and I fear, the expectation is a little foolish even.

This is the kind of year, the one people will speak of as the worst they had ever seen in their five, or their ten or thirty years of living in the city. In their entire lives. The most snow. The coldest temperatures. The most storms. The longest winter. They say this year after year. Some sections of sidewalk along the mostly residential blocks on Shuter Street have been taken care of with diligence- cleared and salted, salted and cleared, twice a day when the accumulation came down like this. But for the most part I must take short footsteps, brace myself on one leg before planting the other as surely as

77 I can, along a packed, uneven path narrowed by the snow shoveled from residents' driveways and walkways, and that shoved up along the sides from the clearing of the main roadway. I mustn't slip.

The men with the snakes around their necks come to mind. Do you remember, as we were walking back up the steps from the beach just after the sun had set? They were poorly made, the steps, angled downwards and you had not only to step up to another stair from the one on which you already were, but to grip the rusting railing tight and pull yourself up so that you didn't slide backwards off the downward slope, and they were wet, too, made slippery from the bathers who were returning untowelled-off to their cars. We were concentrating on not slipping, so we weren't looking ahead. Immediately behind me were three young women who had been chatting loudly, I don't remember about what, but I do remember their high pitched voices, their raucous, daring laughter, and I have the sense that they had been one-upping each other. You were ahead of us, making your way up at a good pace. One of the crazily laughing young women right at my heels snapped suddenly, in an arrestingly loud voice, " All yuh," to which all around her went momentarily silent, and we all became alert. I looked up to see-and all of this was simultaneous- -you cried out and twisted your body back almost to face me, and you blocked the view with your hand, and the women all started various forms of shrill sounds of fear and displeasure. I looked back at them and they too had their views blocked with their hands, and so I wasn't sure where to look. But the one who had alerted the others, her face was stone serious, and she was staring up ahead. And now I could see, coming down towards us were four men- it stands out for me that they were young and of Indian origin, all with short squarely cut hair in the most traditional way-and two of them wore long fat snakes about their necks and chests. Right then, at about the same time when you had cried out, the young woman shrieked, "Move aside." The men looked at her. They were bounding down the stairway lithely, as if the snakes were beach towels that they wore around their necks. "Move aside, get to the side," she shouted again, more certainly than

78 before. They stepped now to the far edge of the stairway to make more room for us all to continue quickly past them. "I fraid them things. Don't make joke with me around them things, you hear!" she said as she passed them, the voice that had been so high-pitched and bright some seconds before suddenly dark and thick. I turned to get a good look at the snakes~an unusual thing for me, as I am one of those people who can't bear to look even at a reproduced image of a snake. They were so thick that the outline of their scales were quite visible inside patches of cream colour, the patches outlined in black, and brown patches, and ochre ones all of irregular shape, and yellow and black spots. They had the full roundness of motorcycle tires, and did not seem to be limply resting, but rather to be quite alert, the pointed head of one angled towards the beachfront. Their underbellies could be seen in parts and here they were white, the scales less smooth looking. The eye that I saw in swift passing was light brown glassiness. I turned to see who this young woman was who had just taken on four men and two boa constrictors. She was gangly, taller than us all, but she looked-and sounded in her laughter and idle chat before the men had come along-like she might have been no more than sixteen or so.

I suddenly felt the cold, as if it were penetrating my coat now, and pulled the scarf up so that my chin was taken in by it. Across the street the front door of one of the Regent Park town houses opens slightly and out of it comes the sounds of high-pitched voices shouting in a language I don't understand. There is a child, a young girl holding open the door, one foot still inside the other ready to come out. She wears a dark blue hijab and a light baby blue nylon winter coat whose hood is pulled over the hijab. A boy pulls open the door and runs past her into the yard. An older woman, their mother I presume, in a brown hijab rushes out onto the small patch of porch and seems to be scolding him. He is laughing and seems to be answering back. The girl is still at the door, still halfway in and halfway out. She is not laughing. They are black, I notice, and must be Muslim. There are numerous other people on the street now, and I still can't fathom this, but there are more bicyclists. The

79 bicyclists come down River and angle carefully into the bike lane on Shutter. There is a young woman who is a fixture on the street. Even in winter she wears very little clothing, and this morning she doesn't seem to feel the cold as she wears shorts, high boots and a small jacket. She is wearing a red Santa's hat and animatedly greets each car that passes. Her hair escaping under the hat is stringy and light brown. She is high, her constant state. I see here regularly, either soliciting car drivers, or hurriedly walking, her body twitching and spasming and her limbs jolting~her parts discordant with each other. This is not an area I enjoy living in. I keep thinking, "soon, one day soon, and I am out of here." But to where, and as to how, and when this soon will be, I am not entirely sure, and have no real plan to accomplish such a move. It occurs to me that I should not be walking here, with this large amount of cash in my knapsack. Someone~and it is entirely possible in this neighbourhood-could take advantage of a person felled by the circumstances of a treacherous sidewalk, high snow bank, this weather, come to her as if to help, but grab her knapsack and run off with it. It would be a small miracle if I were again to come upon such an amount of cash for this purpose, but the letters-that would be the greater loss. Or, come to think of it, she could end up in emergency with a broken ankle or something, and even there, in emergency, lose control of her knapsack. I grip the shoulder straps of my knapsack, hoisting the load a little higher on my back, and trudge on. It is more likely, to tell the truth, that I would step in dog pooh on this trip to Victoria and Shutter. Dog owners don't seem to think it necessary to pick up after their dogs when there is snow on the ground. The dark lengths of it, and the little bundles, melt the snow directly beneath and sink an inch or so, putting them just out of sight, and making it easy to step in if one isn't careful. As if it isn't enough to have to brace myself firmly in this kind of terrain. On a family outing, once 'down the islands' in Auntie Phulan's family's boat-the boat was called Giselle-the sea had been rough and I, not a sailor even in my dreams, had felt the cereal and the orange juice I had had for breakfast, and the sugar cake, watermelon, pumpkin

80 pone, aloo pies and sahínas I had had when we arrived at the marina, surge in my chest. With every lurch of the boat forward as it hit the side of a swell, every dip downwards on the other side of the swell, the boat rocked, side to side. Seagulls squawked overhead noisily, and they seemed to be following the boat, and there was the smell of gasoline~this was the environment that encircled our little watery world, and I felt as if my brain was in a never-ending process of shrinking. My eyes were popping right out of my head. The skin of my cheeks seemed to be swelling and I was sure my cheeks were about to burst. The vomit had risen further up my torso~I could feel it inch up. My seafaring cousin Monesha had been chattering away, and when I made no acknowledgement of her she shoved me hard with her elbow and looked at me. Her first reaction was to burst out laughing, but then she said, Oh, my god, please don't throw-up~not here on deck, anyway. And she, as airy and as happy as a sail, immediately began to coach me to not resist the motion of the boat, to imagine myself to be an unanchored boat, or a straw, on the water, letting the motion take me, as it will, without resistance from me. Become one with the flow. Don't resist. Release all your muscles, all your defenses. Look out, just above the horizon. Breathe. I had to concentrate to let go. In little time my upper body rocked back and forth, side to side, just as the boat did, and I had become a fixture of the boat. What it did, I did, how and where it went, so did I. The nausea subsided, my brain returned to size, my eyes settled back into their sockets, and colour returned to my cheeks. So now I relax the muscles in my back, my neck and stomach, my butt, drop my shoulders and let my arms swing as naturally at my side as I can in such a thick coat. It surprises me that I don't, on 'letting go', immediately feel a rush of cold swarm me. In fact a film of air slips into my jacket cooling me pleasantly and I feel myself glide along the ice and snow-covered side-walk, past more fresh dog shit, and when I have to walk on patches of sheer ice, I move now with a small elegance past the idling taxi's that have made this stretch their unofficial taxi stand.

81 The Shuter and Sackville crossing guard's large wobbling frame that intimidates and repulses me, even as I feel some admiration for her, is announced by the sharp cautioning bursts of her whistle that come across the distance, dampened only a little by the blanketing snow of the park to one side, and this cold air.

The park that, on account of its size, is officially called a parkette, is a bright white field of fresh snow through which a direct path cuts from the apartment building that buts it on one side, and to which the residents have key access through a gate in the fence, to Sackville Street that runs perpendicular to Shuter. There is usually a congregation in this parkette, early in the morning, and late in the evening, regardless of the season, of neighbourhood residents with their dogs. But this morning there is only one, a woman with a big tall black dog with gangly legs and it is bounding about as if it and the snow are playmates.

A police car, no lights flashing, creeps by, deliberately. I know that the police most likely have their eyes on the network oftall apartment buildings on the north side of Shuter, as it is known in the neighbourhood that in those apartment buildings can be found all kinds of drugs to satisfy the various needs of the area's addicts, and there have been numerous shoot-outs and busts, and bang-ups there. Still, I instinctively hold my gaze ahead, and try not to look guilty of anything-of heading, today, for instance, to a hospital to have the kind of surgery that OHIP won't pay for unless I was benevolently certified. Another police car approaches, but neither appears to be in a hurry. Imagine if I were stopped and searched and the thirty hundred dollar bills were found in my knapsack. I stopped feeling badly, long ago, that I wasn't diligent in responding to your ceaseless flow of letters. But I feel so deeply appreciative that, for whatever reason, whether it was simply that you needed to put your thoughts down, and needed to direct them to someone (and I was the lucky), I feel so grateful that you

82 wrote on. It was I in the end, who needed letters to hold on to. Those—these that are in my knapsack—I would not lose for all the money in this same bag. The traffic along Shuter is slight, but steady. The Doppler effect of the slapping of snow that is being churned to water as it hitches to and releases off the tires of the passing cars, is a constant in the background.

83 Saña

To Dhani,

Happy Birthday,

From your best friend. Ps. By now I am sure you know the wisdom of having me as your best friend. The reason I permit you this honour is because ofthat very wisdom. Happy Birthday, my best friend.

How can you not think Mrs. Rodriguez's son is not THE most handsome boy you've ever ever ever seen????? I think I am totally in love. I am feeling wild and giddy. Why on earth didn't I take commerce??? I could have gotten to him through her, you think? I think his name is Paul, but they call him Dizzy. Dizzy?! Hmm, I wonder if that is because of what he is, or what he makes others.

I don't care, I will convert. Do you think I have a chance? His mother knows I have brains. He can find out for himself what else I have to offer. Which is a lot.

But, Dhani, you are such a prude. Have you never been in love with a single fellow? How can you not think he is a total catch?

I know I have a lot to offer because I have a very fertile imagination, which can't be said of you.

84 You are not the first to say I am self-centered. And you are not only a prude, but you are very stuck- up. I don't know why I give you so much of your time. I don't understand you. You spend all our free time with me, but you don't let me get to know you. You don't open up at all. What are you hiding?

?

Well, it feel's like you're hiding something. I tell you everything going on with me, and you hardly ever tell me a thing. I think about you all the time, Siddhani, but you don't consider me ever, do you? What does it mean to be a best friend? You have to share yourself. Not just your damn sandwiches and your homework, but YOURSELF. Should I be reconsidering this friendship?

Do you like the flower? I left it for you. It's from Mummy's garden. Don't just leave it sitting on your desk, you Moron. Put it in some water. There are jars by the sink in the art room. Do you like it?

Dear Dhan,

It's been three days you left, and I know it takes longer than that for a letter to arrive, but I can't wait to hear from you. What is it like? Is it cold? Have you seen snow, yet? Have you met any other Trinidadians? I am so worried that you are going to replace me overnight. I can't believe you're starting university, and I will now be a year behind you. But I have to work this year, as my father isn't, as we all know, as flush as yours.

Reggie comes over almost every day after his work. Mummy has dinner ready for him now when he arrives. I don't know how I feel about that. Sometimes proud, sometimes like she's pushing us on him. Daddy still doesn't talk to him much but he doesn't take his eyes off him either. They still won't let

85 me go out with him, except to buy corn or for coconuts in town, and then we have to be right back. Reggie said he will convert to the Muslim faith if that is what it takes. Sometimes I am so in love with him, and sometimes it's as if I don't really care. But everybody is supposed to get married, so I suppose I will one day, too, and he isn't a bad fellow. He is applying to go to university next year, too. Mummy knows this, but not daddy. I don't have anything to compare with, but I love when he kisses me. His kisses have gotten what I would call a little more urgent lately, and they've become open mouthed. That I like a lot. I can't go into detail about how I feel, because I am shy-yes, me, I am shy, and yes, with you—but I am sure you will find out very soon what I am talking about. I can't believe you didn't let Bindra kiss you before you left. You don't know what you're missing. You are so cold hearted sometimes. That fellow will give his life for you. But if you're not interested, then you're not interested, I suppose. Who are you waiting for anyway? Don't go and fall in love with some crazy northerner, just because you might be lonely. You have to come back here and marry someone from here. I wonder if Bindra will wait for you. Perhaps distance will make your heart grow fonder. A lot of people would want their son to marry into your family. You're lucky. I can't imagine I'd meet anyone again, and so I think it is only a matter of time before Reggie and I hook up. If we were to get married, you will have to come back for the wedding, OK? I can't believe the things I tell you. I hope you don't show my letters to anyone.

Ok, write me as soon as you can. I hope you have already, and that this letter and one from you will cross paths.

Your best friend ever, for always,

Safi.

86 Dear Dhani,

So, Reggie and I are at university too, now. Daddy still isn't talking to us, and that is causing hard times at home. I am worried about Mummy. Poor thing. She and Daddy hardly talk to each other, and I am the cause of it. But, thank God for telephone service coming to the cane field, I talk to Mummy everyday, two and three times, some days. She still (still? That will never change!) makes all Daddy's meals and sits at the table with him while he eats, even if they don't speak a word to one another. I can't imagine being with anyone for my whole life like that. Anyway, enough crying. I am still sad you didn't come for the wedding, which just shows that you are still strange, and will probably never change, and I guess I have no choice but to accept you as you are. And if you're trying to get rid of me, I won't give you the satisfaction. Because I am not going to give you up so easily. That is just the kind of person I am. Anyway, we love the bedspread you so kindly sent. It is on the bed right now, and already all kinds of wonderful things have happened beneath it and on top of it! Use your imagination. Reggie wants to be a different kind of man, he says, so he makes breakfast on Sunday mornings. Eggs. He can't cook roti, or choka or anything like that, but he can boil eggs, and do toast. And he actually ties up the garbage and takes it downstairs every night. I can't believe how lucky I am. (I am half joking, of course). (But half serious, too). (Men really are a different species. I think they need us more than we need them, which is to acknowledge that we do need them, or at least their bodies! Yes, I am enjoying the sex part a lot. An awful lot! )

School is going well. I am still planning to do medicine, but that is one area where Reggie and I have disagreements. It's really the only thing we ever have disagreements about. I don't think it's such a big deal, but it's the only thing we fight about, and for him it is a very big thing. I really don't understand. His father talked him into taking over the business, and he talks about me working in the business,

87 regardless of what degree I get, or what I say. I will have to show him who is the boss, but there is time for that. I am enjoying being bossed (just a little bit bossed) at the moment.

So, I hope one day you will tell me what you are learning about yourself. It isn't very fair to just say, "I am finding out so many things about myself, and my ways in the world are beginning to make sense to me, where they haven't, either to myself or to others before." Just what are you talking about? I am interested—I know sometimes I give- or rather gave-the impression that I wasn't really interested in what you had to say, only in telling you about myself, but I have to admit I wonder all the time what you're doing, what you're seeing, what you're feeling and thinking, who you're becoming, and if we'll always be friends when you come back here, after being in such a big strange place. Just don't get strange, (or should I say strangER?), OK?

I have to go study now, and then get dinner, but please write me back and tell me something very specific and detailed.

I can tell you I love you, and you won't think I am strange( I think there are some people like that at the university, but each to his own, her own, whatever! ! I suppose) as you know that I also, and in a very different way, love Reggie too, and deeply. So,

I love you,

Safi

Ps, Reggie sends his love, too. He is so sweet.

Dear Dhani,

88 I haven't heard from you in months now. Reggie and I celebrated our second anniversary, and I was a bit surprised not to hear from you around that time. I expected you'd come for Christmas, and when I didn't hear from you I phoned your mother. She said you don't write home much anymore, adding something like you're making friends there. Who are these friends? Friends, or friend? Such good ones that you're nor coming for Christmas? I can't believe it. Your mom sounded disappointed. I suppose it saves them the airfare though. At least I know I have the right address, so my letters must be getting to you. Write me, you Moron!

Life is changing for me. It seems as if I will do some business courses now. Not 'it seems'. I'm doing one as it is. So, I guess I will be going into the business with Reggie. He thinks doing medicine will take so long, that we will be putting off having a family, and that our relationship will also be put on hold. He says when he graduates he wants to have a wife, not be living with a student still. I don't really mind, after all. Medicine, business, it's all just work, and in the end it's not about the work itself, but about contributing to society and building a family, and you can do that no matter what job you do.

Do you still like doing art and all that stuff? Do you still think you will be an artist when you grow up? Will you ever grow up? Somehow I feel you are one person who will never grow up. I sort of envy you. Growing up is so over rated. But, you might have to teach to make a living. Unless you marry a very rich man. Have you met one yet? Is that your new friend? I want to ask so many questions, but what' s the use if I don't hear from you?

Well, just to tell you, I suppose, I am very interested in what is happening with you, and I really miss hearing from you. As time goes by, I realize that you are the truest friend I ever had. Funny to say that when you won't even write back. Even though I don't feel I got to know you as well as I let you come

89 to know me, I feel that you were more real than anyone I know. And it's unusual, no, it is ill advised to be too real with anyone in this place. People talk so damn much in this place.

Take care of yourself, whatever you are doing, and know that you have a friend here, if ever you need one.

Yours always,

Safi.

Dhani, just a short note-my busyness has multiplied tenfold- naturally. The feeling, after the baby has left your body-of her still being, not an appendage, but almost an organ-a real physical part of me, that is, hasn't gone. I am suspecting that this will not happen EVER. And I feel like a queen of sorts because of all of this. Mummy comes over every day, and even daddy is treating Reggie with much more respect now. And Reggie-do you know, it's three months now, every week, ever since Aliya was born, that he sends me flowers? I am actually waiting for the flowers on Thursdays, and when they come, even though I am expecting them, it is such a wonderful surprise! I think it's a surprise because I can't imagine it will go on forever, and I am wondering when it'll come to an end. You know me, forever cynical. Or is it realistic? He is working hard as usual, and the business has really taken off. He comes home every day smelling like heaven-jeera, and illiachi, and anchar másala. Do you know we are in talks with a company in India that wants us to make up a range of spice mixes for them? It's very odd how these things work. We will be sending a curry mix to India! But it's a very big account, and we will no doubt have to make changes here to accommodate such a client. I am hoping there is a trip to India in this soon. We are in the process of buying some land in the Central

90 Range, to cultivate with jeera, bhandania, and shado benni. So, of course, the mix we will make for the Indian account will be a Trinidad blend, actually exotic in India.

So, queen, but if this is what it takes, I think I can do it a few more times. I'm already thinking about playmates for this sweet little child. She needs a brother to take care of her, and she needs a sister to confide in-not siblings to look after, so it'll have to be sooner than later. I have totally gotten used to this family life-mothering life, wife thing. I think it. is the most natural thing on earth. Are you getting ready for it? It would be great if we could have kids that are about the same age. Wouldn't it?

S.

Dear Dhan,

I was very surprised to get a response from you at all, and so quickly. Everyone is well, thanks. And yes, can you imagine the two of us in India? If we get the account, and so there will be travel there. When I go, and if you are able to, you must come with me. Things are going very well here, and if you carry my bags for me, and wait on me hand and foot, I will pay your ticket there, and we will have a blast. We will have to go looking for our roots. But it's a bit early to talk about it— I can't imagine leaving Aliya for another year or so, and even then it would be difficult, except that sometimes I think she thinks my mother is actually her mother, which I don't really mind. I love how close she and Mummy are with each other.

Congratulations on the exhibition. Can you send photos of your paintings? I'll have to buy one of them before you get so famous that they'd be out of my reach. But that isn't likely, the way this business is '

91 going. We have bought half an acre just off the main road in San Juan are building a new factory, and getting a lot of new machinery, and plan to move into it by the end of the year.

So, I see you took offence to me saying that it was natural to be a mother and a wife. Can I say that it is naturalfor mei And that I am totally fme~I make no judgment~if it isn't something you want to do? I am a little surprised at how verbose you were about it. From this I realize that the subject meant a great deal to you. So, you got me thinking in truth about the idea of what is natural or normal. I can think about it with a touch more clarity than I can write about it—but what I want to say is that I can see how these things—the value given to being a mother and a wife might be cultural. (And it sure is in a lot of cultures! -but maybe cultures change with time. And with the times). But you and I are from the same culture, so, since I totally trust your judgments about what you need for your own happiness, all I can come up with is that our cultures might be a little different, but since we're from the same country and same race-that maybe you being Hindu and me Muslim has something to do with it? But I also know that every Hindu girl/woman I know, shares the same ideas I have of being a wife and a mother, so I either know only the ones who think this way, and not the ones-besides you-who don't, but I also think that this might have something to do with how liberal your family is compared to mine? Or maybe it is just that you are different. You are unique, and that there is nothing unnatural about your idea-just different. In any case, it was always your differences that made you so interesting. And I wouldn't want you to be anything else, or anything you didn't want to be, or are not. I don't need to understand you, I realized, I just need to understand that we are two unique persons. But come to think of it—I want to understand you-I just need you to be more like me so that I could understand you. I hope you're following me, as this is all very important to me. I also don't need to understand my connection/love for you. It's just a fact. But-and don't get mad at me for asking this- but do you think becoming a mother has made me a more loving person? Sometimes I feel as if I am

92 just brimming over with love. Sometimes I even feel kindly disposed to you! Just kidding. Do you mind me kidding from such a distance?

Love always, and all ways,

Dhani, I'm sending this to you with much love. She's 6 months old in this picture. She has Reggie's chin, and my eyes. Mummy spends a lot of time over here these days, so I can study (one more course to go and I am finished). It's good to have Mummy here with us-we're eating well, for a change. You know I can't cook roti to save my life. We usually buy it from Ali's but Mummy's is so much better. And cheaper! I can't believe I just wrote that. It's not like we have worries about money at all. Not boasting, you understand, just want to tell you all that is happening to me. Anyway, the other side of Mummy's presence here is that we're all putting on a lot of weight. Aliya is such a good baby. She doesn't cry-except when she is hungry, or wet. Otherwise she smiles a lot, and makes the sweetest attempts to have conversation with us--and I find myself talking back in imitation, in baby talk-never thought I'd find myself doing that, but she gets so excited, and looks really satisfied when I speak back to her like that. I wish you could see her before she grows up.

Dear Dhani,

I have been writing you in my head all day, and I still can't find the right words. I don't know if I ever will. I only know that the words I have are the wrong ones. I know this instinctively, but I don't have others, no matter how hard I have been trying, to try and talk with you about what you told me in your

93 last letter. I should say, in your letter, not last letter as if you've been writing many! (Just kidding, but you know this, I am sure. Some things never change).

First of all, I want you to know, that ours is a 'til-death-do -us-part connection, just as I always knew it would be, even if you didn't. So, I think we just have to try and figure out how to talk to each other about all of this. I have to tell you that I am very very happy that you told me. It explains so much to me. I never understood why you didn't have a boyfriend. And I always knew you were~I want to say strange, but I don't mean it in a negative way. I suppose I could say different. It can't be easy for you. This makes me wish I were close by, so that I could be there for you, and so that you could know how much you mean to me.

It is hard, if not sad, to think I have known you all of these years, and thought of you as my best friend, only to realize that I didn't really know who you were. On one hand I wasn't really surprised when I read this in your letter, but also I was very surprised. Both at the same time. I guess my surprise was more that you had been this way while I knew you, and I didn't know this about you. That you must have been going through some sort of agony and I didn't know about it. I can understand that this was not an easy thing to tell me, but still, I am your best friend, and I can't help but feel as if you weren't truthful to me. Can I assume that I meant so much to you, that you didn't want to lose me? I'll accept that! But did you also think so little of me? That I am so small minded? I don't understand what it all means, and I want you to tell me. You'llhave to have patience with me. But I think this is only fair- payback for all the patience I have had with you !

I have questions to ask you. Since when did you know this about yourself, and how? And do you mind if I tell Reggie? I talk to him about everything, but I don't have to if you'd rather.

94 One thing I wonder is if you knew this ever since we were in high school, and if you did, how hard it must have been for you, having to make sure no one found out. I can't help but think of Jenny Banchin. Do you remember her? We used to say that she was—well, I don't want to repeat those things. I feel so badly about how everyone used to bad talk Jenny, and I also remember you saying to me that people should just be allowed to be the way they were, and that we shouldn't harass her so much because we don't know anything about her life at home, and all ofthat? Do you remember saying that? Did you actually know about her then, and did you know about yourself, then? How you must have felt. I do know that she never really bothered me or, rather I couldn't really be bothered with her-because she never actually bothered anyone, did she? But I never tried to stop others from bad talking her, even if I myself didn't. I feel so badly about so many things right now, and wish you were here so that we could talk about everything. It's difficult to say everything in a letter, especially when you have to wait for a reply-and may never get one! I love you, Siddhani.

Take care of yourself, and be happy. You deserve to be. There is so much to admire about you.

Your best friend, forever,

S.

95 Home For the Funeral

It was 5:30 in the morning, and with talk ofbandits roaming in the pre-dawn hours, of highway robberies literally, and these senseless murders throughout the country, Dr. Rajkumar nevertheless drove himself to the airport to meet his daughter. He was late, intending it so, so that he wouldn't have to park the car in the parking area which was a good distance away, walk to the arrivals gate, and then after meeting his daughter walk back to get the car. But planes arriving from Canada came in a good half hour or so early these days.

Night broke as Siddhani stood waiting in front of the arrivals building, and a heavy grayness, as if it would rain any minute, emerged in the sky. What appeared to be low clouds on the distant horizon slowly transformed into the outline of the northern range, home to shy and impossibly colourful birds, to protected frogs, snakes, deer, tapia and agouti. Home in the long-ago days of the Black Power Revolution to politically motivated guerillas; it was murderous outlaws and drug runners who were said to be hiding out nowadays in pockets in the mountains. The light coming out of the east caused the landscape to change rapidly. Ahead, emerging with the dawning light was the parking lot. A wide umbrella spread of almond trees shaded the lot and the doubles vendors who had already stationed themselves there, and out of the trees birds began to quibble, their collective sound seemingly aligned with the light of day. Siddhani was able to watch the range take form, deep vertical ridges gaining solidity, light on one side, darkness evaporating on the other. The jungle used to hold for her delightful mysteries she dreamed of unraveling, but crime has turned that idyllic paradise into something to steer clear of. Safi's killers, as of some 10 hours ago-the last time she had spoken with her mother-had not been found.

96 A line of cars idled in place, their drivers stood outside, leaning against the door, ready to jump back in and make the circle if some authority were to come over and move them along.

Siddhani had taken her eyes off the mountains ahead for no more than five minutes, and when she looked at them again banana plots, silk cotton trees, poui, and immortelle had emerged. Out of a range of countless shades of forest green, she picked out the roofs of houses, the silver of a unpainted galvanized roof, the fleck of a red one, a turquoise one. She had insisted her father not come, that he send the driver. The driver normally took him wherever he went, but Dr. Rajkumar had never used a driver to fetch the members of his nuclear family from, or to take them to the airport. There was a time, before she left home for university abroad, when all their plane travel had been done together, family holidays taken in Tobago, Barbados, Grenada, Miami, London. Then the driver would drop them all off at the airport and pick them up on their return. The first time one of them went away alone, was when Siddhani left for University in Canada. The whole family, driven by her father, went to the airport. She had sat in the back seat of the car with Meera her sister and her brother Jaan. She sat between them. Meera kept her small hand in Siddhani's larger one for the one and half hour drive, and whined when Siddhani need both her hands to get look in her bag to make sure she hadn't misplaced the phone number of the family from whom she would be renting a room. Meera fell asleep against Siddhani's shoulder and when she woke up she cried because she had fallen asleep and was so robbed of the last few minutes with Siddhani before she went away for four whole months. When she returned for the two week Christmas holiday, they all came to meet her. This time Meera was shy at first to look directly at Meera, then she held her again, and wouldn't let go of her, followed her around for a full two days. Today, Siddhani's mother was more realistic-they would all be better served if she had a later and more leisurely beginning to her day.

97 Most of the other drivers who also chose to arrive well after the planes estimated time of arrival, and an accounting, too, for line-ups through immigration, for collecting luggage and being stopped at customs, made quite a production of their arrival—they picked up speed for the last few approaching yards and then with some movie-like flair swerved, slid and abruptly came to a halt, the driver jumping out of the car with the authentic swagger that a hot place inspires. She wondered what murderers did in the daylight hours, if they had family arriving from afar, if they walked in public with such boldness. Dr. Rajkumar rolled his car in slowly. He waited for a parking spot, pulled in carefully when one became available, a strained smile on his face. The car had barely come to a stop and the trunk had begun to open automatically, a slow motion revealing of an empty, immaculately clean, royal blue carpeted area. He stepped out of his car, and, never in his life one to swagger, walked around to the sidewalk, his gait slow. Day had begun in earnest, the sky now as blue as it would be, the glare as strong. Morning sun in the tropics is only a breeze less scorching than at noon.

In a place where everything is theatre, and gossip the main pastime, Siddhani felt self conscious in front of the people who came to meet returning family and friends, and even, suddenly, by those arrivals, her fellow travelers, coming out of the building. At the airport in Toronto, she had looked around at the passengers in the ticketing queue. If in the city they had shied away from one another, taking refuge in the anonymity, pretenses, secret ambitions that a large city offered, here in this line-up there was the shared knowledge that they were all living in a place that was generally cool to them, and that they were all pooled indiscriminately near the barrel's bottom. Was there anyone else on the flight going for Safi, or who knew what had happened to Safi, who had some involvement, she had wondered looking around. It was impossible to tell what grief, if any, what experiences people held close to their chests.

98 She had felt self-conscious. She hadn't dressed up like the majority of passenger had for the return. The women, not all of them, but certainly the majority, had prepared well to show the shape their body was in, their shoulders, their décolletage, and several had hair that shined as if wet, piled high on their heads. They got away with such bold and public exhibitions of who they imagined themselves to be, and she both admired and scorned them for it. It was as if they were intending to send a message to the people they were returning to about what they had made of themselves, of what fortunes had been made. They seemed to want it known that commodities coveted back home were available to them, and financially accessible, that they now had new tastes, and indulgences, they were different individuals now. And yet, she thought, how similar they all seemed. Such pretenses between them all. Trinidad, from the day the Spaniards had landed on it had never been an easy place for a living being. Every one of them, she thought, was counting on the possibility that, by sheer dint of living in that northern abroad, they would be greeted back home like warriors and champions. Wasn't that, after all, what she herselfwas hoping for? She felt herself morally superior for not subjecting herself to facing on a daily, minute by minute basis, the fear of robbery, kidnapping, murder, rape. Wasn't she a champ for giving up all the perks of living back home with family, perennial sunshine, roti and food from the sea available and affordable every single day? Velvet sand, warm refreshing salt water, waves, music everywhere, and rhythm? She hadn't run away. She, rather, acknowledged the value of life, her life, and that's what she chose. Her life. She went a step further than the other travelers, in her estimation, and showed her difference from all those others who had once escaped and were back now (with their return tickets in their hands) in her own manner which wasn't incidentally perverse. She chose to wear baggy blue jeans, a golf shirt the fabric of which was printed in varying widths of horizontal stripes in red, yellow, white, and green Adidas high tops. She didn't carry a flashy sparkling handbag, or one in faux alligator skin, but a green all-weather knapsack with a good number of little exterior pockets, and

99 dangling unused belts and buckles, from Mountain Equipment Co-op. Twenty years ago when she was first leaving, her mother had taken her to the dress maker to have a travel outfit made. She chose a jacket and slacks in dark brown corduroy. Women in Trinidad didn't wear jackets, unless they worked in air-conditioned banks, and then they were made of thin cotton-polyester blends, and were work with some sort of top that made sure to say that that jacket was not a sign of their masculinity or of too much independence. They chose corduroy because it was heavy and they thought she get good wear out of it in the cold weather, a kind of cold she had no imagination for. She wore under the jacket a blouse her mother bought for the occasion. It was white and had a rounded collar that had an edging of cut lace, and little pearl buttons. She knew she looked smart in it, but it wasn't comfortable. Not days later, she saw as she walked about in it in the city, that it looked crudely handmade, and of no identifiable fashion ideology. She stopped wearing it after that.

She had sensed they were all looking at each other, gauging if being abroad had really done this one or that one any good, a distinction that could best be made if it could be figured out where a person had come up from in the first place. So, now, here at Piarco, they were all, including her, looking again, she wondering if any had benefitted from the ransom money that had not yet been traced.

Her current clothing choices~a fashion sense she developed away from her mother and father, away from the Trinidadian notion of what a women wears~and her manner were a gibberish she felt people were attempting to decode. She did not let her eyes catch those of the other passengers, for fear of seeing ifjudgments were being made about her, the way she was making about them. She opened the bottom two buttons of her golf shirt and pressed the sides back, open and flat, pulling her top lip over the bottom one and blowing delicately downward into the ? of the shirt.

100 Siddhani had noticed, among the returning women, two other women, women, she was willing to bet, like herself. There were enough of them to form a side but they, too, took pains not to catch anyone else's eye, not even each other's. She caught them doing the same sorts of avoidances. They looked at their luggage, at their watches, read their passports, into the trees, at the sparrows hopping about rather close to people. There were, after all, certain instances when there was weakness in numbers. One person here or there, confounded, but a little gathering could give birth in the mouths of others to a language of condemnation. She knew too, that after you had been an outsider, it was difficult to find a way back in. Similarly, after you had been a special case for much of your life, it was not easy to share that space with anyone. Still, there studied ignoring of one another made her chuckle. She was already drenched in sweat.

The sun's glare and heat were now unforgiving. She wished she had accepted Vikesh's offer to fetch her. How confusing it might have been to these people she was sure were paying her attention, if a man of his flash and circumstance were to have arrived to meet her. How pleasant, she thought wearily, that might in fact have been. She was looking forward to seeing him later that day.

Dr. Rajkumar's face was well known. It was always remarked that Siddhani, save for a balding head and his well-trimmed beard, resembled him in features and manner. Sometimes when she looked at herself in a mirror she saw him, particularly his distant eyes-he and she shared a manner of appearing to always be on the verge of leaving any situation even when they were standing in place quite still. He had her—or rather, she took his high forehead, prominent cheekbones and delicate slits for eyes that were bright and alert and gave away their northern Indian ancestry. Everything else, including her thin, perfectly symmetrically and perfectly arched eyebrows, and the thickness of skin under her chin, her curved and fleshy hips, that unboundable décolletage, she got from her mother. Both her parents were light skin Indians. Whenever she returned to Trinidad, not having had the blessing in Canada of

101 365 days a year of at least some sunshine, she came back paler than her parents, a look that made people back home think of her as mixed race, or as coming from a comfortable and privileged background.

She lived outside of this country for two decades now, and was not a public feature of her well-known family, but their resemblance was undeniable. She imagined the talk—must be Mr. Rajkumar 's daughter- but, you don 'tfind she look a little...- their lips exaggerating a sneer, the look of knowing all too well, in their eyes. He too was well aware of how the minds of his fellow countrymen and women work. How he greeted this daughter-he looked at her shoes, rather than directly at her- differed from how he used to greet his son and his other daughter when they used to return from university, and both of whom, with no difficulty or mind to do otherwise, conformed nicely. He used to grip them in his warm embrace, close his eyes, and talk to them like that, welcoming them, before he released them. She should have kept handy a pair of shoes, she thought, perhaps lighter open-toed slippers, and have changed into them inside of a washroom in the arrivals building before coming out here.

A lit cigarette between the fingers of his right hand, Dr. Rajkumar lightly gripped Siddhani's shoulders, pulled her to him and patted her back-she returned the embrace and felt the bones of his scapula-but this greeting was over in a second, and they got down immediately to the business of the luggage. He dropped the cigarette, stepped on it and twisted his foot. The soles of his gleaming patent shoes were thin, the weather here not warranting thick-soled protection from cold, or as support for long walks. For a couple of decades now, people who belong to her family's world did not go for walks. It was too dangerous to be outside, everyone used to insist, even though nothing ever happened to anyone. That fear started during the time of the Black Power Revolution. You were more afraid, if you came from a background like hers, if you found yourself in the proximity of a black man, than an

102 Indian man. But while it used to be racially motivated fears without any other crime that skin colour, today bodies snatched, killed and dumped in broad daylight, all of these crimes unsolved, gave new meaning to what dagenrous meant. It is said that Safi was snatched, in broad daylight as she was getting into her car in the parking lot of the West Moorings Mall. Her keys were found by the door of her car, but no one saw anything. No one ever saw anything, her mother said repeatedly about the way things were at home. The outing of her father's cigarette was deliberate, an action intended to be followed by another deliberate action. It was the garnering of strength, preparing himself to lift the bulging bags into the trunk.

It's OK, Dad, I will get it, she said. They're heavy. He protested, but she detected in his voice an unusual wavering, so she tried again, inserting herself between him and the bag, but he firmly was firm, no, no, don't be silly, of course I can do it. Siddhani did not know if she had insulted his age, or his gender. He gripped the handle of the lighter of the two, heaved upwards, but then struggled with the final lift into the trunk. She reached under and lent a hand up. Once it was in, he shoved and shoved to move it to the far end of the trunk. He said with lightness, "We hadn't realized you were returning for good!" She picked up the other, heavier and larger, a knapsack in which was her lap top. He didn't protest this time. She was able to do it with a little less trouble than he had. The waiting passengers, some taxi drivers and porters watched. Her father helped with the last few inches of lift- she didn't need his help, but she let him--and they let the knapsack tip into the deep trunk. Siddhani's vision had narrowed. She saw no further than what was directly related to her~she could not bear to see if anyone was watching them, watching her, and what judgment was being made. Her father had still not looked at her, at her face. They go to their respective sides of the car, and her only consolation as the brazen watching from the people on the sidewalk continued-which had caused a terrible sweat to break on her--was that surely there must have been some envy that she, as ungainly as anyone here

103 might have thought her, was picked up by her father—a man who was well-known in the country and for good reason—at that hour of the morning, in a shiny forest green-coloured Jaguar. The windows were slightly tinted giving the sense of enough of a separation between those outside, and those inside. She thanked god for air conditioning.

A drive that ought to have taken an hour even in rush hour, took two and a half. They were at a standstill at times for 15 minutes without a single car budging an inch in the pile up on the southbound lanes of the divided highway. Siddhani suggested turning off the engine, not to save the car's energy, but to save the earth-although, as she knew from experience, she preferred not to come right out and say this and risk sounding as if she were imposing her North America acquired righteousness after only hours of arriving. Turning off the engine would have meant, too, turning off the air-conditioning. It was not until the third police vehicle came up on the north bound side, that they realized that not a single other ordinary vehicle had come, indicating that something major had stopped traffic on both sides of a four lane throughway that is divided by a wide ? shaped grass and gravel gulley. I think this will put some strain on the air condition, I better turn off the engine, her father finally declared, We can turn down the windows, just for a few minutes~you don't mind do you? Knowing full well that the question was politely rhetorical-he had already begun engaging the controls on his steering wheels to turn down the windows, her answer matched it. Sure. Drivers and passengers, all men, had come out of their cars, strangers standing between the two lanes of cars pointing south, their chatter heard through the open window, expressing resignation about being late for this or that, some lamenting they had left home so early, especially to beat traffic, that they had not even had breakfast yet. Heat, like a tangible curtain, blew into the car and with it the smell of exhaust, wood smoke, and a blend of curry spices so powerful it suggested a spice roasting and curry powder factory was located nearby. No birds

104 could be heard but three corbeaux circled wide and slow high overhead. She wanted to ask him if Safi's kidnappers, her killers, had been found, but at the same time, didn't want to mention her name just yet. She suggested listening to the radio for possible news of what could have been causing such a major jam. Her father turned it on. From station to station there was music, Indian, or Calypso, and advertisements. He and she made small conversation. She asked how her younger sister Meera was managing being a young grandmother. Her father, in his typical way, managed to twist the conversation so that at least for a moment it was about him. The problem is not simply that she is now a grandmother, but I have been made a great grandfather! That is what shocks me. Then he added, your sister is no longer working: she's looking after Ravi. I think Saloni has been trying to find someone to care for him in the day, but they're saying it's hard now to find reliable help. There is so much crime, as you know, in this country right now, Siddhani, one can't be too careful. It's not like when you all were growing up. Children don't go out of their houses to play in the road like you all used to, or walk from one friend's house to the next, you know. Not even in neighbourhoods like ours. Or rather, especially in neighbourhoods like ours.

Still, he said nothing about Safi.

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