THE IMMIGRANT (32 page)

From the uncle there was wholehearted approval. Respectable integration always to be welcomed, and beti, don’t worry if this doesn’t pay very highly, you have a doctor for a husband. Gainful occupation is more important than money in your case.

The group was pleased. From being controlled by circumstances, Nina was taking the first steps towards autonomy.

Sitting across from her Gayatri felt all the pride of a parent. Of course Nina would perform brilliantly, and keep her scholarship.

Beth told her she would never regret her decision; she had loved every minute of her two years at Dal. Now that she had gotten a job for fourteen thousand five hundred dollars at Acadia University, she and Jerry were moving to Wolfville.

Her colleagues at the HRL greeted the news with enthusiasm. Nina had taken a bag of small chocolate bars to work—trying to replicate the distribution of sweets such news would engender at home.

The ones Nina felt least close to were the most elaborately rewarded. Gary and Sue were treated to dinner at La Gondola, down by the train station. The atmosphere was warm; the wall- paper red velvet, the place crowded, the candles on each table romantic. The paper napkins bore the legend of Papa Gino, poor boy from Italy, now enterprising immigrant. She hoped she would be as successful as Papa Gino.

The two couples talked and laughed and everything seemed right.

The rest of the summer passed in anticipation of fall. Nina noticed her status had risen, both in her group and in her place of work. She was following the path her husband had trodden when he came here all those years ago, getting a degree that would affect the makeover of her Canadian identity. Two years was a small price to pay for such a metamorphosis, said Ananda.

iii

When Nina’s life as a student began, she was afraid she would not only be the sole foreigner, but also the oldest among thirty four young Canadians, sticking out like a sore thumb.

But she had underestimated the wide reach of North American education. The thumb had companionable fingers—there was a student each from Malaysia, Lesotho, England and the USA. Others from Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec and Ontario also claimed foreigner status, while fifteen came from the Maritimes. As for age, one woman mentioned a grandchild, several mentioned children, many mentioned spouses.

For the next two years, hers was the comfort of being part of a student body, no longer the outsider, one of many bound together by a huge, squat, grey institutional building, five floors high, crammed with books, learning and administration.

Ananda was fond of constantly reminding her how lucky she was. Unlimited facilities were at her disposal. She thought of the torn, vandalised books she had had to do with in Delhi University, of all the texts it was impossible to get, even in a library, and she agreed wholeheartedly.

The technical aspect of the course was apparent from the start. If she had doubts about learning to do rather than think, she reminded herself that for an immigrant changed situations meant changed priorities. Her group assured her she had to move in ways that enabled rather than disabled her.

In accessing books for others, she had to learn how to wield the keys to what lay within, rather than open the locks herself. In the first semester, there was a whole course on how to catalogue, pin, fix and locate the quantities of print that had been spewed into the world since Gutenberg’s invention in the mid fifteenth century. From reports to books, skittish behaviour was common, as texts refused to confine themselves to one category.

The Killam collection was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, while the lab in the Library School had books catalogued under the Dewey Decimal system. Students were expected to know how to use both, to be able to decide where a book’s rightful place was in all the miles of library shelf. They had to know how to look up reference material and track down articles. Nina’s respect for professional librarians grew. This was the grind they passed through before earning themselves places behind reference desks in the libraries of North America.

Now Nina was the one to get up first, before Ananda. Her day started at eight thirty, whereas he only had to be at the clinic by nine. It took fifteen minutes to walk to the Killam. On the mornings she was too tired to get up early, Ananda would drop her.

She worried that he might mind the hours spent away from home. ‘I know how hard a student has to work,’ Ananda assured her. ‘Since we don’t have children, it’s not such a sacrifice.’

Damning words. She searched his face for signs of grief, but there was none.

‘Do you mind?’

‘You didn’t seem much interested in my sperm report.’

‘Healthy sperm doesn’t necessarily lead to a baby, otherwise we would have had one by now.’

‘We’ll examine our options when your course gets over.’

‘Yes, we are in the land of technology.’

‘Exactly.’

As Nina walked to and from the university, brilliant leaves showered their benefits on her and turned her preoccupied mind to beauty. Her second fall here, her sense of wonder was still as keen as she watched autumn colours shade into the austerities of winter. She often emerged from school when it was dark, and wanting to shake off the sense of closed spaces, she chose to walk home, instead of calling Ananda or taking the bus. All through the long winter she walked, through the snow, the wind and the drifts. For the second time, she marvelled at the intricate designs made by bare branches outlined against the sky. Initially so dark, branches and twigs whitened under puffy snow covers, then in times of slight warmth and subsequent freezing, became encased in slick and shiny ice, lengthening into points here and there. She wrapped the warmest of her shawls around her head, trying to protect her ears against the burning cold, trapping the moisture of her breath against her skin.

One of the drawbacks of the Killam was that classrooms were completely sealed off. Most of the library sessions took place in room 406, on the fourth floor, around the corner from the Department. It was a room of three stone walls, with curtains on the fourth side shielding them from the corridor. Push those aside, and you could see an identical wall on the opposite end of the concrete quadrangle.

Gradually Nina got used to being cocooned in white fluorescent light. The claustrophobia receded along with memories of how open everything was in India. Her old self was, day by day, overlaid by the new things she was experiencing.

At Library School, they considered themselves a self-contained family unit within the larger university framework. They had their own lab, reference sections, classrooms, lockers, notice boards, coffee and tea centre with oven-toaster and fridge, an informal seating area where they had what they called fireside chats with the head once a week to discuss department news. As a scholarship student, Nina had to look after the lab on the other side of the staff rooms, re-shelve books, make sure the room was clean and tidy before their get-togethers.

Friday noon was usually reserved for guest speakers. The second time Nina saw the librarian of the HRL was when she came to talk about issues of censorship at the local public library and how to handle them.

By Friday evening, a party feeling pervaded as staff, students and spouses gathered over drinks. When Ananda came, he let it be known that he was a graduate of the Dental School, a place where his uncle and his partner sometimes gave lectures to dentistry students on Friday afternoons. Maybe when Nina became a librarian and brought home the bacon, he could become a student again and specialise.

The nascent librarians looked at him, smiled, nodded and appeared interested. For the first time he was socialising with people Nina knew, instead of the other way around. She found she was afraid he would say something to demonstrate how Canadian he was. All said and done, she preferred the smaller gatherings.

iv

Among the students of the Library School was one who looked upon Nina and found her attractive. Anton liked Asian women; he found them warm, intelligent, gentle and empathetic. Settled in America, he himself was two generations away from the Russian peasant. His hair was blonde, short and curly, his skin somewhat weather-beaten, his small eyes a bright blue, his hands and body square, his height medium.

During coffee breaks he often headed towards her, ‘My wife is Indian,’ he said.

‘Indian?’

‘Like you. Though she speaks differently.’

‘What part of India?’

‘It’s the West Indies. Trinidad.’

Foreigners understood nothing. ‘We don’t consider that India.’

‘Her grandparents came from your country.’

A pause.

‘What does your wife do?’

‘She’s a nurse in a children’s hospital.’

‘How come you are in separate places?’

‘It’s cheaper to study here, and the American Library Association recognises it.’

The break over, they drifted back to class.

Before one of the get-togethers: ‘Introduce me to your husband.’

Nina couldn’t think of one thing they had in common, but replied, ‘Sure—if he comes. He can’t always attend. I used to work part-time on Friday evenings, so he started fixing to do other things then.’

‘What is he?’

‘Dentist.’

His face crinkled. ‘I don’t think I know any dentists. This will be a first.’

‘Yet your teeth are perfect.’

‘I mean socially. I was too scared of my dentist to ever want to know her.’

‘Ananda is not at all frightening.’

‘Or what would you be doing with him?’

When Ananda did come, Anton sought him out, but found him full of Canada, his dental setup and his achievements. His wife’s brother, a little less genuine than his Lakshmi, also tended to talk like this; maybe some male immigrants caught the competitive bug easily.

‘I see you have met my husband,’ remarked Nina, the Monday after.

Anton smiled his brilliant, white, even-toothed American smile.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, what did you think?’

The smile went as he looked at her. ‘Not good enough for you,’ he said, and turned deliberately into class. She was left confused—which meant that Anton had succeeded in his intentions. Their first field trip in December was his target. By then he hoped to persuade her into something more intimate.

Library School assumed an excitement for Nina that she hadn’t anticipated. Everybody was so nice and friendly. By now she and Anton had fallen into a bantering relationship. They were both married, and to keep things clear, she made frequent references to his wife and her husband. He in turn would grin and turn the conversation back to some personal aspect. Were all women from her country as intriguing? Why, Nina countered, did he want her to generalise about millions of women? And so on—inconsequential, but for the undercurrents that made each word significant.

Soon it was accepted that they had lunch or coffee together. He was easy to talk to, but her tendency to linger over what he said bothered her. Here in Canada, men and women often connected on platonic levels, it was such an immigrant-like thing to be disturbed by some man who paid her attention. Perhaps she should go back to India. No question of platonic levels there. Every male–female interaction was suspect.

In December Ananda paid three hundred and fifty dollars so that his wife could go to Ottawa to tour the National Library, the National Science Library and the National Archives.

Mandy entirely approved of the field trip. ‘Who knows, maybe she’ll take a lover there,’ she teased, watching Ananda’s face.

The husband regretted the impulse that had made him tell Mandy about Nina’s trip. He normally preferred to keep the two parts of his life separate, but the prospect of all that lovely free time had dented his usual caution. ‘My wife is not like that,’ he said briefly, and it was the words ‘my wife’ that led to their first fight.

He supposed she was
like that,
hissed Mandy, well, he could take his fucking clock, get out of her life and stay out. She was tired of being second. He should get his priorities right.

It took an hour and many promises to calm her down. For the four days that Nina was going to be away he would spend every night with her. He would show her his apartment. He would take her out for dinner. Now he had to go.

Mandy knew he was referring to the function at the Library School, something she always made it very difficult for him to attend. All summer, Friday evenings had been hers, the wife had her part-time job, she had the husband. She saw no reason for this arrangement to change.

How on earth did people manage affairs, wondered Ananda. They were not as he had imagined, smaller versions of a relationship; they functioned on another plane. The many lies and exhausting time juggling that went into meeting, heightened the intensity of each encounter. He and Mandy made love in its rarefied atmosphere, and he frequently told her he would die without her, she was his saviour.

Filled with the guilt of this, he couldn’t fight with Nina even when she was irritating him. This artifice lessened their relationship and made it seem superficial. Love for Nina began to wear the face of responsibility, and when he was with Mandy he naturally felt less burdened.

Sometimes his life seemed unreal to him; all his desires were being fulfilled after his marriage. He wished he felt a little happier, but now the only place he was fully himself was when he was peering into people’s mouths. Then everything fell away; he was doing something he was good at and which brought him recognition.

As he drove home from his assignation, he thought of the empty spaces marriage had filled, the comfort of routine, the daily companionship, the substance that his parents had been trying to provide him with when they died, now at last his. It was marriage too that had given him Mandy; in his mind his wife and his mistress were inextricably linked. He neared Hollin Court and automatically began to think about the evening menu. Nina was going away, he wished he had time to make her something special, but Indian food was so labour intensive, he often ended up unfreezing the batches of dal he made on the weekends. That, along with rice, cumin peas and raita, would be her monotonous dinner.