\u201cWatch your ass.\u201d
\nMy sister Meena laughed, but Aunt Radhika was serious.
\n\u201cPrepare yourself. It\u2019s what they all want sooner or later.\u201d She offered this warning while turning rotis on the stove, thrusting her leathered fingers into the pan as the flatbread puffed like a balloon and blue flames flitted at the iron\u2019s edge.<\/p>\n
She spoke of husbands. Now, finally, was the time to dispense advice, as my visa had come. Now was the moment for discussing, in graphic detail, which parts of myself I\u2019d be expected to surrender. But what did she know? Her husband was drunk on 80-rupee whisky more days than not. There wasn\u2019t a week that went by when he didn\u2019t piss in the staircase at 2 a.m., or lose the grocery money on a card game. \u2018V.S.\u2019 Such a discreet name for a man utterly lacking the quality.<\/p>\n
Canada would be different. It was <\/i>different, I could see it written on the landscape as the plane slipped through the crisp air. Things looked neater. An orderly people, Canadians. Kept their noses clean. That\u2019s all I really wanted \u2014 a clean nose. No one pissing on the stairs.<\/p>\n
Pawan was a good person, I was pretty sure, and so my dream was in the offing, waiting on the far side of an endless flight. Didn\u2019t a telecom engineer in a sweater-vest have to be good, wasn’t such a person the definition of sedate pragmatism? No crazed hippy, no gold-yoked gangster. Just a B.Tech grad in reasonable attire. And he\u2019d acted sweetly at the wedding, so that was something. But it\u2019s hard to gauge a man in four days.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome to Canada.\u201d Three girls stood behind the counter at immigration, speaking cheerily in unison. I\u2019d expected burly uniformed figures like the antagonists of Indian soap operas, seething and suspicious. Instead it was like a child’s birthday party, a trio of moms doling out goodie bags at the front door. They passed me a pouch of pamphlets and scrawled something in my passport. Then they sent me unceremoniously into my new life.<\/p>\n
Arrival is the anticlimax of immigration. After all that waiting, all those forms, tears, applications, arguments, and interviews, you get nothing but three words and a bag of papers. As ordinary as paying your electric bill or washing your husband’s laundry \u2013 something I\u2019d be doing by tomorrow. No flair for drama, these Canadians. Still, life would be different here. It had to be. Anyway, all the great changes sneak up unseen. Like your first wrinkles, the slow fruits of worry that move in edgewise over decades.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
\u201cHey,\u201d he said. The waiting area brimmed with expectant souls garbed in grey, Pawan included. He wore a grey sweater as thin as he was and smiled broadly, gums glistening in the harsh tube light. I\u2019d seen nothing to fear in this tiny man, but I noticed my hands become wet and blood rush madly to my cheeks. I hadn\u2019t expected him to say this, not that I\u2019d had something in mind, and I worried any response I could drum up would seem foolish.<\/p>\n
It was a very Canadian thing to say: \u2018hey.\u2019 Laid back. Maybe that\u2019s why it threw me. I was more used to \u201cWhat is your qualification?\u201d than \u201cWhat’s up!?\u201d I realized the Pawan I\u2019d met in Delhi was different from the Pawan here in Vancouver. Or maybe it was I who\u2019d changed, who\u2019d been cracked open by the sharpness of the steel water and all those grid-lined city blocks furrowed with emerald trees.<\/p>\n
I looked in his wide brown eyes and saw a world in them that I longed to know and distrusted at the same time. I wondered if I would become laid back, if I would hang out in coffee shops and drink beer and read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, <\/i>which I assumed wasn\u2019t banned here. Would he allow me? There were so many things to be worked out on this new terrain, and it could go one of two ways. The coin of my life spun furiously in the air and there was no way to call heads or tails.<\/p>\n
\u201cHello,\u201d I said, smiling like it was the first day of a job I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted.
\n\u201cHow was the flight?\u201d he asked, taking my handbag.
\n\u201cOh it was very comfortable,\u201d I said. It was true compared to how I felt at that moment \u2013 there in the presence of a man I didn\u2019t know, but with whom I\u2019d all the same slept many months ago.
\nWe found his car on the third floor of a parking garage crisscrossed with lines of paint that had been scrupulously respected by the absent drivers. The scene was a veritable orgy of order, without so much as a single betel stain splashed on the ankles of the concrete pillars, which partition sections of the garage. So many imagined boundaries deferred to with no second thought. Would he defer to mine, this man of Vancouver?
\n\u201cYou are going to love it here,\u201d he told me, starting the engine.
\n\u201cYes,\u201d I said. But will I love you?
\n<\/i>I had more to say, but not then, not to him. All I could think of was to seal my mind within my body like a tortoise in its shell, and in that moment a tragic respect for my mother washed over me. I surveyed the garage\u2019s shadowed lines, its smooth grey regularity, looking everywhere except at the man I\u2019d been consigned to. Pawan placed a hand on my shoulder.
\n\u201cChinta maat karo<\/i>,\u201d he said. \u2018Don\u2019t worry.\u2019 About what? I wondered. My ass? The car beeped as we slipped down the ramp.
\n\u201cBuckle your seatbelt, it\u2019s not just for drivers here.\u201d
\nWe left the airport for the streets of Richmond where Canada began in earnest. I knew my mother would expect a call right away. What\u2019s it like there? How are the people? How is Pawan treating you? She was just as afraid as I was, though less hopeful I\u2019m sure. There were things I wanted in this life that she wouldn\u2019t dare imagine.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sector 12 doesn\u2019t sound like a hospitable place. Dwarka, Sector 12, New Delhi. Sounds more like a military theatre or a storage lot in an industrial park. The garage where Pawan had neatly squared up his car at Vancouver International could well be called Sector 12. But as we rolled quietly through the streets of Richmond, sealed comfortably from the clouds above, I realized Sector 12 raged with life in a way you could never grasp if you hadn\u2019t seen a place like this; one that sparkled with lonesome opulence.<\/p>\n
What were the people like? <\/i>I\u2019d have to tell mata-ji I didn\u2019t know. As far as I could tell there wasn\u2019t anyone here at all. Immaculate pavement, beautiful sidewalks, sumptuous trees bursting with green \u2014 we passed it all in perfect silence. Even the medians in the highway bore decorations like Rajghat Park, as if we might see Gandhi-ji\u2019s tomb parked under a red light at the next intersection. Yet all was empty, quiet as a cave in the Himachali hills. We drove on and I spotted one person, two. Then again the streets grew barren like someone had stolen away the world. Where were the vendors with their clothing-laden charpoys, their worn-edged bookstands, their fresh bags of milk? Where were the workers tossing bricks five at once, the taxi drivers gossiping at the roadside, the restaurants with their cauldrons a-bubble? Each house looked uninhabited, like I could waltz in, lie on the sofa, and raid the fridge while facing no consequences whatsoever. An Indian archaeologist wandering the great Canadian ruins, picking through the endless reams of empty dwellings for clues to this hidden people’s secret lifestyle<\/i>. Maybe that was a project to keep me busy while Pawan was at work.<\/p>\n
The travel had kept me up two days and as my eyelids finally sank a vision of Aunt Radhika surged forth. She lay naked on her belly tending paranthas on a gas stove as Uncle V.S. pushed himself in her backside. A pang of loss struck me in the throat then and I wished she would turn from her chores to offer advice. Suddenly her head swung to me. She didn’t speak, though, just held a finger to her lips and shhh<\/i>ed, snapping me from my dream into the car’s quiet. I glanced at Pawan but his gaze held firmly to the road. Exhaling briskly I tried to relax, but my ears buzzed in the absence of blaring horns. Would there be no sounds to detect here, were all words swallowed by the thick clouds bearing down on us? Would no one hear me if I cried out? Would no one beat me if I ran away?<\/p>\n
There was nothing to run from, of course. Nothing wrong. And I wasn\u2019t against the idea of being married to Pawan, the idea of washing trace flecks of chicken from his dinner plate, of matching his warm socks as they fell in clingy bunches from the dryer. Even the idea of being his bedroom thing, the unveiled prize of wedlock. Who knows? I might give him what Aunt Radhika was so sure he wanted. I might demand <\/i>it. A woman has a right to her lusts like anyone else. The possibilities overwhelmed. They blinded and couldn’t be looked at like those welding torches in dada-ji’s garage.<\/p>\n
Love might smuggle its way in. I could come to rise and fall with Pawan’s every breath and live just to see the smile in his eyes. It was a possibility. But at the same time I didn’t know yet, and this ignorance made me shrink into my seat and disappear, made me float off on the cold breeze and feel as lonely as anything ever has. The alternative to unbridled devotion was disappearing in the night on a bus to Toronto, wherever that was. It all depended. If he loved me. If he beat me with a closed fist. If he kissed my eyelids and held me tight, or if he scowled at my stupid jokes. I’d signed up to a life raised on a plinth of unproven assumptions, forced to agree it would be fine however it panned out. Nothing could’ve strayed further from truth.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not far now, our place,\u201d he said, pointing vaguely up the road. Our place. I wasn\u2019t sure it belonged to me yet, though it was charitable of him to say. I needed time to see if I wanted it, even if the alternatives didn\u2019t bear imagining. If I was to surrender my time and body, I would reserve the small choices, however ceremonial. Without them I wasn’t sure how much of me remained. We turned up a barren street flanked with towering cedar hedges. They walled in the houses as though planted by madmen seeking privacy from ghosts. Where was everyone? How could so few people build so much city? And what was the point of all these walls? As far as I could see there was hardly anyone on either side.<\/p>\n
The emptiness unsettled me. I didn\u2019t know if I was exiled to nothingness, or if I\u2019d been freed. How was I to be sure? I missed my dog. I missed mata-ji\u2019s cooking. Restlessly I shifted in my seat and tugged at the belt Pawan had insisted I fasten. Everything was wet and green, yet it seemed a desert. I thought of my last moments at Indira Gandhi International. Of mother forcing a smile in her flower-dappled salwar kameez, and of Mina laughing jealously, not seeing how little there might be to envy. I\u2019d felt so alone.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
\nMy coming wasn’t forced; I chose it. It wasn\u2019t thrust upon me like the drunkards who\u2019d 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Mother hadn\u2019t 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\u2019d been. But as we crept closer to Pawan’s house on the ultra-smooth streets through this ultra-bare world, it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I would be his wife, but not the one I\u2019d imagined. I would tame Vancouver\u2019s 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\u2019s futile cedars and follow them to the edge of this grey new world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome \u201cWatch your ass.\u201d My sister Meena laughed, but Aunt Radhika was serious. \u201cPrepare yourself. It\u2019s what they all want sooner or later.\u201d She offered this warning while turning rotis on the stove, thrusting her leathered fingers into the pan as the flatbread puffed like a balloon and blue flames […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1363,"parent":148,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-567","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1447,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/567\/revisions\/1447"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}