My coming wasn’t forced; I chose it. It wasn’t thrust upon me like the drunkards who’d given chase through the simmering Delhi night one April evening and rattled me to the bone. Like Uncle V.S. inside Aunt Radhika. Not that I knew what I was getting into. I’d simply opted out of Indian life. There was no way to know if it would be better elsewhere, not really. Just the wager little could be worse than a lifetime flipping rotis for a drunk in Sector 12.
And though all my hopes to this point clung at the slender man in the driver’s seat, the open space began to work on me. A vision of the world I’d entered, not just the one I’d left, began to congeal. I saw the potential for happy living wasn’t just a matter of good husband or bad. New contingencies sprouted like silver clouds in the low Vancouver sky. New ideas on what life could be mushroomed forth from my peaty mind. I saw that the boundaries of womanhood were lashed to the scorn of neighbours, who in Sector 12 were legion. But in this wash of quiet trees and asphalt, where were they all? We passed many wide-open roads, each as viable as the next. Rolling through the intersections I swear I heard the faint clack of doors unlocking. For a curious moment, as these hidden sounds echoed within, I had the feeling I wasn’t a woman. I had the feeling I was just me.
Mother hadn’t cried as she stood on the marble tiles at the terminal and watched me fly away. She was resigned to my new life, as I’d been. But as we crept closer to Pawan’s house on the ultra-smooth streets through this ultra-bare world, it wasn’t resignation I felt. I was no longer prepared for surrender, as my elders had advised. Who would tell me otherwise? Who watched? This was an empty country, a free one. At this thought, I smiled.
I would be his wife, but not the one I’d imagined. I would tame Vancouver’s vast space, and make it my own. I would be his only if I could be me. These were my conditions and I’d see them respected. Otherwise I would slip into the madmen’s futile cedars and follow them to the edge of this grey new world.
