Outside People and Other Stories Read online

  OUTSIDE PEOPLE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Copyright © 2017 Mariam Pirbhai

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Outside People and Other Stories is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pirbhai, Mariam, 1970-, author

  Outside people and other stories / short fiction by Mariam Pirbhai.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-433-4 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-434-1 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-77133-435-8 (Kindle).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-436-5 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8631.I73O98 2017 C813’.6 C2017-905375-2

  C2017-905376-0

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  OUTSIDE PEOPLE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  MARIAM PIRBHAI

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  To Ronaldo,

  alma de mi alma

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Air Raids

  Chicken Catchers

  Corazon’s Children

  Toronto’s Dominions

  Sunshine Guarantee

  Bread and Roti

  Thirty-Five Seconds

  Crossing Over

  Outside People

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Crumpled scraps of paper adding up to a beautiful life were gathered before me. Amazed, I started feeling its contours.

  —Ismat Chughtai, “Choti Apa” (“Little Sister”)

  One writes against one’s solitude and against the solitude of others.

  —Eduardo Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America)

  AIR RAIDS

  HE APPROACHED HER on the Métro between McGill and Mont Royal. He said he spent most of his life in the air, instructing people how to save themselves in the event of crash landings. They missed their stops but neither shied away from admitting as much. They knew what it was like to find themselves between stops, and people. Perhaps the sheer impossibility of a prolonged exchange compelled her to ask him to look her up the next time he had the luxury of standing still. It was an honest response, like the smile that dominated her expression at the touch of a warm breeze. He knew what it meant to require the heat to smile. She knew they would meet again, above ground, out in the open.

  ***

  He called as she felt he would.

  She hoped a brisk walk to his hotel in the sunshine would help cast off the cloud hanging over her and, with it, the residual arctic air of an early summer morning. She had read that such bouts of melancholia were a normal part of the grieving process. By the time she reached the next intersection it was clear there was more to it. Today was an anniversary of sorts—the day she and her parents had become naturalized citizens. It should have been one of their better days, but the rawness of her father’s nerves had soured the event—or, at least, her recollection of it. How many times had he scrutinized the “notice to appear,” or insisted they practice reciting the national anthem, as if citizenship could be denied to those only pretending to sing “O Canada” in the judge’s presence. When she asked him why they should swear allegiance to the same Queen their country had rejected, he shot her a disapproving look, saying, “This is your country now.”

  As she rounded the corner onto boulevard de Maisonneuve, a frigid wind tunnel taunted her overestimation of the sun’s power in a northern climate. Even after all these years, she brooded, warmth was the only natural condition she craved, immediately regretting the response as an act of betrayal in a way that only an immigrant’s daughter could.

  She tried to focus on her destination as she approached the Complexe Desjardins, an imposing edifice with an unobstructed view to the public events held in the expansive plaza at the heart of the Quartier des Spectacles, the city’s arts and entertainment district. She walked along its periphery, thinking of the invisible border between the city’s eastern and western selves, the clash not of civilizations but of two founding nations still shackled to the trajectory of conquest, when empires fought on the high seas for sugar cane and slaves, or slit each other’s throats with bayonets across the Plains of Abraham. Only now the war was waged on different plains, like school curricula, store-front signage, rival public holidays, and legislative bills.

  She passed the street-level entrance to the Montreal symphony, just a few metres behind a talkative group setting down placards and banners on the plaza’s steps. A curious sight, she thought, since it was too early for the annual jazz festival that would fill the streets with beer tents and concert stages in the weeks to come. And it was too early for any other kind of event, including her own Sunday morning dalliance.

  If it weren’t for the fact that this was the only time they could meet, before his airline made its return trip to Morocco, she would still be lazing in bed, waking up to the heady odours of roasting coffee beans from the numerous cafés surrounding her apartment in the trendy streets of Plateau Mont Royal. She was one of the lucky ones. She had nabbed her apartment for a steal before the Plateau’s gentrification, beating out other applicants because the landlord had taken an immediate liking to her. “You’re different. You’ll be a good tenant,” were his exact words. She wasn’t sure if it was her difference or their shared foreignness that put him at ease. It turned out that Mr. Somek was a Sephardic Jew from Iraq who made his fortune when the textile industry was a mainstay of the Montreal economy.

  Such revelations might have eluded her had Kostas—Somek’s oldest tenant who managed the dépanneur on the first floor of her three-storey dwelling—not been a busybody with a fondness for local trivia, an animate version of the tabloids he couldn’t keep from flying off his dusty shelves. It was Kostas who told her the life story of Plateau Mont Royal, named for the city and the little mountain that stood at its epicentre. Though it was renowned as the Latin Quarter because of the thriving francophone enclaves of artists, intellectuals, and, increasingly, Beamer-driving yuppies who lived there, this was but a recent incarnation. It had belonged, not so long ago, to the new immigrants and to the workers, as much as any set of streets, parks, schools, shops, and houses could belong to anyone. One community squeezed out the other. Apparently, that was the way it worked around here. No one ever referred to it as a cause-effect relationship, but, like the green-and-white flowers block-printed on her summer dress,
the pattern was hard to ignore. “Look at Park Extension!” Kostas lamented, referring to his own working class neighbourhood just north of the Plateau. His family had lived there for three generations. Now, according to Kostas, you couldn’t buy a decent souvlaki or find a reliable travel agent on the entire stretch of rue Jean Talon between l’Acadie and avenue du Parc. Since it had morphed from Little Greece to Little India, Kostas said, his family had joined the exodus west and north, into the suburban sprawl at the island-city’s limits.

  In fact, she had wanted to correct him, his beloved old neighbourhood was not so much a Little India as it was a Little Pakistan, where local businesses bore names like 786 or Khan Brothers Video and Paan Shop, given the recent influx of refugees from the country’s northern region at the foot of the Himalayan range. Her parents used to describe this sublime part of the country as the “Switzerland of the East,” a far cry from the images of U.S. drone attacks, terrorist cells, and cross-border warfare that now dominated the news. And the Little Pakistan that was changing the face of Montreal’s western half was only matched by the ever-burgeoning Petit Maghreb in the city’s eastern half. Soon enough, the two would meet in the centre, their shared symbols of Arabic calligraphy adorning mosques and community centres, colourful boutiques, specialty grocers, and family-friendly restaurants, fusing together a place so long divided by language and history.

  Before she entered the Complexe Desjardins, which apart from a mall, restaurants, and office towers housed the five-star hotel accommodating his airline crew, she deliberated whether she had time enough to smoke a cigarette, a habit she had officially broken, more or less. The rumblings of the gathering crowd drowned out the battle of mind-over-matter raging within her and she threw another glance across the street. This time she could make out some of the wording on the placards.

  MULTI-FAITH GATHERING FOR PEACE.

  VIVE LE QUÉBEC LIBRE POUR TOUS.

  QUÉBEC IS NOT FRANCE.

  And the largest one: “I AM NOT A SYMBOL. I AM A PERSON.”

  The placards were clearly directed at the government’s recently proposed legislation to ban religious symbols in the public sector. The controversial bill dubbed the “Charter of Values” had made headlines for weeks, with groups of all religious backgrounds calling it a violation of religious freedoms or an attack on multiculturalism, itself the haloed credo of the nation. Satisfied with her discovery and the momentary diversion it offered, she suppressed any further cravings and pushed open a heavy-set glass door. With her back to the morning light, the reflection of another placard caught her eye, the words CHARTER OF SHAME obliquely burned into her retina like a sunspot.

  As she made her way through the dimly-lit air-conditioned building, she cursed the paradox of a society that complained about a half-year long winter only to imprison themselves in refrigerators at the first hint of summer. A courtyard fountain, which seemed oddly out of place in the hotel lobby’s carpeted interior, provided a welcome refuge, far enough from the prying eyes of bored receptionists, but in plain sight of all the major entrances and exits.

  Finding her patiently seated at the fountain’s edge, he stooped to kiss her on the lips without a trace of awkwardness, as if theirs was a long-nurtured intimacy. He admired her summer dress, remarking that the first time they had met she was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt—“like a real American,” he snickered light-heartedly. Then he traced the back of his hand along her bare arm, until his fingers reached the gold pendant resting just above her cleavage. She had been meaning to shorten the chain. The pendant was a childhood gift from her father. She wore it in the same spirit with which she cherished the twelve jingling-jangling gold bangles she had worn religiously since his death. She could swear the bangles had made an impression on her skin, either from the weight of all that precious metal, or from memories weighed down by the alchemy of mourning. On the days she felt resilient and on top of the world, the physical explanation suited her just fine; on most other days, only the metaphysical explanation seemed commensurate with the depths of her grief. Today was an odd sort of day, eliciting neither extreme.

  Holding the chain between his fingers, he recited by rote the surah engraved on the pendant. She liked the way he made the ayat al-kursi rise and fall the way she couldn’t. He took possession of the surah in the language that brought its inscription—the words she held like an epitaph against her skin—to life. His recitation was redolent with belief, whereas hers was distorted by the utterings of a childhood in rebellion, reminding her of what she was and wasn’t, who she was and wasn’t, where she was and wasn’t. She blushed in embarrassment, checking herself against the invisible judge and jury she carried around like a worn-out lipstick in a purse.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu t’en souviens de notre première rencontre?” he asked about their first encounter, the nearness of his breath so warm against her skin.

  “Que nous avons oublié nos destinations. Tu as manqué ton arrêt, et moi, le mien,” she answered back in the language her brain and tongue still struggled to accommodate. “Et quand tu as vu ce pendentif, tu as pensé que je suis, comme toi, Arabe.”

  He said her eyes had given her origins away: the russet brown of a Medjool date, the variety that his family preferred for iftar, when breaking their fast during Ramadan.

  “I haven’t fasted since we came here,” she said, instinctually falling back on English. “But I will never forget the first iftar we shared as a family—I mean, as an entire nation, waking, eating, and dreaming in unison, at least for one brief moment.”

  “Donc, nous sommes d’une seule famille,” he declared, gently setting the pendant back down against her skin.

  “Yes, tell me more about your family … about yourself.” Was he amused, she couldn’t tell, but thought a little curiosity unobtrusively expressed was worth the risk of mockery.

  She was a novelty at best, a deviant at worst. For surely he was accustomed to two kinds of women: the ones who helped turn each of his stopovers into an inevitable embrace, the kind who rendered bearable the din of passengers demanding headsets or airline meals, or made the increased suspicion of airport security a surmountable indignity. These were, like his passengers, women of the air, ephemeral, existing in the parentheses of life. And there was the other kind: the woman who would become the mother of his children; the one with whom he would break his fast and observe the various and sundry rituals required of the faithful. The woman he would barely need to speak with because she would complete all his sentences for him, existing as she did on solid ground, in the main clause of life.

  Virgin and whore. Redemption and sin. Did he really look at her this way, through the lens of an either/or conditional? Or was this her defence against the possibility that if there was more to him, she would have to adjust the visual syntax of an orientalizing gaze? Or was she looking at him through the prism of her own upbringing, not his? At any rate, here she was: a neither/nor by anyone’s and everyone’s standards.

  “What would you like to know?” he indulged, taking her hand and leading her toward the elevator.

  When they got to his room, the curtains were fully drawn, hugging tightly to the illusion of night but not enough to drown out the muffled sounds of the people gathering below. She walked over to the curtained wall, parting the heavy folds to look down at the plaza. From this new perspective, the tops of people’s heads, many of which were dressed with hats and other kinds of head coverings, wove in and out of each other in tapestries of colour. Then her eyes rested on the more sobering sight of television news vans, police cars, and the RCMP amassing along street corners, at the ready to shield the crowd against itself.

  She felt his arm graze past her shoulder. He closed the curtain, shutting out the little light streaming into the room, as if the sun and the shadows cast on the world below belonged to a time and place that didn’t matter, as if she had entered the twilight that seemed to define this virtual stranger
’s existence. For wasn’t he so far away from home—she let her mind wander as he gently coaxed her away from the window—far enough that she could well imagine a mother fretting over the child she had given over to the necessities of survival? For some reason, she imagined him to be the eldest child sacrificed for the sake of the youngest—at least for the one who still carried the ember of a mother’s belief in a man’s innate right to greatness. How else could a mother endure a job that put her son in harm’s way each time he took to the air? At least before the world had started pointing accusatory fingers at airborne Muslims, his job had given him certain liberties as a global citizen. Now, because of this same mobility, he was an object of suspicion at any port of entry and every guarded exit.

  She thought of her own parents’ anguish when she had insisted they release her to the unknown, where she could live outside the purview of their vigilance. Had they not also succumbed to the unthinkable out of necessity? She had wanted to study painting and art history, but she was an only child, bearing the levity of dreams and the inevitability of sacrifice in equal measure. With a university admittance in hand, she put the distance of a province between them, only to find herself working long hours proofing data for the Québec Ministry of Education’s English-language website. It still afforded a kind of freedom, at least until she got locked into the job for the sake of the very same house she dared leave behind, mortgaging her future against a father’s compulsion to put down roots on foreign soil, willing her to occupy a state of mind that was, for others, a birthright. But how could she stand by and watch them lose a house when it was their only stake in a land that made them feel like trespassers on its less charitable days, the sort of day that condemned a child of immigrants, no different than herself, to cross the threshold of manhood shackled to a holding cell or an island-prison? She could never have anticipated that in her father’s absence, her mother’s dreams would be so different, encouraging her to forget the house and attend the university she had travelled all this way for.