Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (28 page)

After reading that section, I was compelled to turn to the following well-thumbed passage:

Oh, Sydney. This grief, this idea you have carried for so long that you were responsible for Zain’s death—how I wish I had known of it. I regret that you and I never discussed it, that I was never given the chance to allay your fears, tell you that you were guilty of nothing.

But whose fault is this? Should I not be the one who carries the burden of guilt—for bearing prejudices you knew you had to be wary of? Oh, Sydney, the silences you had to keep, the unspoken words that tortured you. Your body lies cold in a funeral parlour, but wherever your spirit lives now, hear my words: it is not you who is guilty.

Never before had I considered the concept of heaven. But on the day of Sydney’s funeral—another for which I had no precedent—my mind was wide open.

I was Sydney’s custodian—not of his body as it lay in his casket, but of the part of him that was not perishable. I wanted the impossible: to correct the misconceptions that had swirled around him when he lived, and to organize how he was to be remembered. To this end I prepared and practised my eulogy until I knew it by heart. Sydney’s two friends from the Baphomet group would speak first and then I would deliver a eulogy that would reveal what a compassionate and understanding parent Sid had been to me. I wanted to say how he and I had been apart from each other for many years but were reunited nine years ago and how in those nine years he had bared himself to me, and I had learned about his courage, his humanity and his unfathomable ability to love. I wanted to say that he was a hero to me, and an example to us all.

As I waited for the ceremony to begin I felt in moments like an angel, benevolent and fierce; in others like a child, unknowing and in awe; and in still others as if I were a divining rod that sought truth, like a fierce and fearless demon. And sometimes I saw my utter powerlessness, and I felt raw and ignorant. In those moments, I was unsure of everything.

The time arrived, and I stood on the veranda next to the open casket and Sydney’s body, garlanded and sweet-smelling. Before us sat a small gathering of about thirty people, including Gita and Jaan, who had arrived the night before. I looked at Sydney and then at the gathering. And I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

I cleared my throat and tried again.

I had no sense of how much time passed before a voice I did not recognize came out of my mouth. It said simply that Sydney had been the best parent anyone could hope to have.

The lineup of cars headed for the parking area of the cremation grounds advanced no more than a single car-length before stopping for several minutes, then moving again. This was the pattern and the pace for about a quarter of a mile on the road that ran parallel to the Caroni River.

We lost sight of Pundit’s car, and of Gita and Jaan’s, but I saw a hearse about five vehicles ahead of us and assumed it was “ours.” If Gita did not come to the cremation, I thought, I would be furious—and yet, I also did not want
her anywhere near Sydney during those last minutes when his body was still visible to all. I turned to see if I might be able to spot her car behind us, and saw that Rosita had her hand on Lancelot’s on the seat between them. Lancelot had not spoken a word throughout the journey.

In the distance, three discrete plumes of grey smoke whirled heavenward. That I was to be the one to press the button that incinerated Sydney’s body still weighed on me. I was ignorant of the details of things to come, but after the small fiasco of not being able to speak earlier, I resolved to do whatever was required of me.

Sydney’s last hours in the hospital—after his only two visitors had left and he began to speak to me again about his life—came back to me then. I recalled how I had taken the relative vigour in his voice to mean that his condition was improving.

He had been telling me of arriving in the office at the Irene Samuel on that morning of the blizzard. But he did not begin with leaving his apartment or speak of the journey in the snow, as he usually did. Instead, that last time he had told me of his final minutes of consciousness as Siddhani Mahale.

He began his story at the point where Siddhani was in the surgery ward, and was handed a dark blue gown and ushered to the changing cubicle by a perfectly kind woman. The woman’s kindness had meant everything to Siddhani. She was aware, as she prepared to go under the knife, that she was all alone, and that when it was over, when she came out on the other end as a different being—as she had
imagined she would—she would be all alone then too. She had stood motionless in the cubicle for several minutes, in a sort of confusion. What if she had found love here in Canada? she asked herself. What if she’d had an income, and a home with her own front and back yard, a garden with lilac trees and blueberry bushes in back, and peonies and roses and a mulberry standard in front—a place of her own, that is, one that had made her secure and comfortable? What if India and she and I had remained together as a family, a happy family? What if she’d had success as an artist and her work had been in important exhibitions, and her paintings were bought, collected and written about? What if in Trinidad she had seen that the mould in which women were cast could be broken, and yet women not themselves be broken? What if she had been told from a young age that it was all right for a woman to love another woman?

She removed all of her clothing and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror. On the verge of losing her breasts, it was as if she was seeing them for the very first time. Indeed, she could not remember ever having really looked at them before. Well, she had, but only when they were covered up with clothing—and then, to her, they presented an unsightly bulge that made her feel as if she were twice an imposter: once because she did not feel like someone who should have such appendages attached to her own body—they gave her no pleasure and she had no interest in them becoming anyone’s objects of desire; and twice because even when she took pains to disguise them—wrapping
bandages about her torso, wearing sports bras that flattened her chest, donning clothing made of heavy fabric—whenever she caught a glimpse of her reflection what she saw first were her slight eyebrows, her full lips, her small hands and feet, her hips and thighs. In effect, she saw a woman with flattened breasts. She could not lop off her hands and exchange them for bigger hands. Nor her feet. Nor her hips and thighs.

Standing naked in the cubicle she had looked at her breasts, and she’d imagined them to be not her own, but the breasts of a lover. Had they been on someone else she would, she saw, have found them interesting. No, not simply interesting. She would have found them beautiful. She would have thought they were desirable. She’d want to touch them. She had never had a lover who was of her own race—or, for that matter, who was not white—and so she was pulled towards this new sensation in several ways. She turned one way and regarded her breasts, then turned another way. Her breasts were pale, creamy. They had not the slightest blemish.
Unused
was the word that had come to her mind. They were unused. They were new. They were virgin breasts. The nipples, she said, and then corrected herself:
her
nipples had reminded her of a nectarine seed. She put her hands beneath her breasts, and imagining them again to be those of a lover, she cupped and lifted them so that she could feel their weight. They sat in her hands like small cakes that, had they been on her lover, she would have set her mouth to. She lifted them and ran her thumbs over the nipples,
her
nipples, and it was the first time that she had felt such a sensation. She would not cry, she told herself. Naked, she sat on the bench in the cubicle, her heart sinking, her courage waning. She looked at her breasts and admitted that it was odd to remove a couple of large, healthy chunks of herself, parts that were alive, parts that had not been compromising her physical health and were, she suddenly saw, beautiful. In a few hours these two parts of her body would be gone. She saw them in her imagination, set carefully down by baby-blue latex-covered hands, into a pale blue bucket that sat on the floor. They were cut off from their blood supply, and had begun immediately to wither and die, to rot. She thought of her first big love, India Lewis-Adey, of when she and India had first met and there was that crazy, delightful thrill between them. And then she recalled India telling her that she had to leave. And, finally, she thought of me, the child she had brought up and had loved.

Siddhani knew, Sydney told me, that she could have changed her mind about the surgery. There would have been a fee to pay, naturally, but she hadn’t had to scrimp and save for the money. She thought of Zain pressing the bills into her hand. She had a choice, and this was her last chance to make it. And then she was overcome at the sudden memory of sounds outside the guestroom door as Zain had lain in her arms—sounds of footsteps quickly taking the stairs.

She remembered lying on the narrow table, imagining her reconstructed chest, picturing herself walking up Parliament Street—why Parliament Street she couldn’t really
say, but there she was walking on it—in an ironed blistering-white dress shirt and blue jeans. She had all along refused to take injections of hormones to affect a greater change in her appearance, but just as the doctor lifted the syringe into the air and told her to count backwards from ten she resolved to start the hormone therapy as soon as she was able to. Instead of counting from ten, she imagined herself in that white dress shirt—no need to bind her breasts—and those jeans, and even though she knew better, she saw herself taller too. She was already more lithe, she was already feeling new confidence. And she went under smiling.

The
kurta
and pants I wore bore no pockets, so I carried with me a small cloth shoulder bag in which I had placed my wallet with my ID and Sid’s three notebooks. I had brought them along, intending to place them in the coffin before it was closed and taken away. The bag lay on the seat of the car beside me. From the bag I removed the last of the notebooks and turned to Sydney’s final entry. I knew it well, but I scanned it, my eyes lingering on the lines:
And yet, ten years later, when we broke apart, I hadn’t stopped loving her
. Farther on, I read, and held on to the words:
I could not bear to say goodbye to Jonathan and so I did not
. And towards the end of the entry, I read the words I had wished, on every reading, that I’d had the chance to respond to:
How do I explain it so that he doesn’t think I ran away, gave up, failed?

I tore out the pages of that entry and folded them so that, tucked into my wallet, they fitted neatly and safely. I put the notebook back into the bag and drew the bag close to my body. I kept one hand on it, feeling the shape, the weight, the size of the diaries it held.

We were beneath the flight path to the airport now. Intermittent planes passed low. I imagined myself in one of them, sitting as I had been on the flight here just over a week before. I imagined myself looking down, exactly as I had done then, tracing the brown bamboo-lined river as it wound through cane fields and rice paddies. On the plane then, I had known that Sydney was ill, terminally ill even, but I had no clue as to what this meant or what awaited me. Sitting in the car, I imagined that on one of those planes coming in to land was a man, a man like myself who, unknown to him, was arriving to face all that I had experienced these past days. If I possessed powers that allowed me to rise up from the car and sit alongside him in the plane, I would do so, I thought. But knowing what I knew now, what would I say to him? I would put my hand on his, as Rosita was doing now with Lancelot, and tell him that he was about to find out that nothing he had learned before was going to be of any use to him in the days to come. I would tell him that whether he was aware of it or not, he had so far gone through life with the assuredness that—as a young man, as a young white man from a first-world country, as a young white man from the great city of Toronto—he was capable of anything. There was no reason for him to
imagine that he was not in control of his own life. I would point out to him that he likely felt he knew what there was to know about everything that had anything to do with his life and with the future that awaited him. I would tell him that he was, however, about to find out that he was incapable of understanding certain things that might have seemed obvious before. He was about to find, for instance, that he was incapable of stopping the forward movement of time, and of reversing it. The young man on the plane would no doubt remove his hand from mine and look at me as if I were mad. He would say, “But who doesn’t know that it is impossible to stop time or reverse it, or advance it by even a fraction of a second more? Only a fool, that’s who.” I would answer that it was one thing to intellectually know the impossibility, but quite another to face the reality and the unfairness of it, and still more difficult to accept it. You cannot know what it means to be alone and to be powerless until you experience this, I would warn him. And I would say that I had learned that time was deaf. It was unfeeling. It had no regard for anything but itself.