THE IMMIGRANT (36 page)

Free. Did that mean she was sick of him?

No, silly, she had replied, why are you so insecure?

I am not insecure, he said with some annoyance.

Then what’s the problem? she had laughed.

All he meant was that if she had a decent paying job—one that didn’t involve temping—she would be financially better off.

And not in a position to meet so many men. She had made the initial moves—what was to say he was the only one in her life? Yet, when he asked once, she laughed and said, ‘You’re a fine one to talk, you with your wife, suppose I phone and tell her, then?’

‘You do that, baby, and it’s all over with us.’

He was never harsh and now his tone made her retreat.

In general, however, he could insist on nothing with her, though often baffled and frustrated. No matter how many times he thought he would break up, he couldn’t do it. She represented too many things. Indeed she was his Newfoundland—something he had stopped saying because she got irritated.

Meanwhile, an overwrought Nina’s conscience began to talk. She spent a lot of time avoiding its company, but it came persistently, an unwanted guest, its rhinoceros hide impervious to rejection. Is it right or fair to be upset with your husband about a bill, when what you do is so much worse?

What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Anton will soon finish and return to New York. It’s not as though I am taking anything away from Ananda.

Don’t quibble. You are guilty, guilty. Look how scared you are lest he hear something, suspect something.

I will never spend any of his money, never. I will earn on my own, buy ten cashmere sweaters on my own.

The dialogue continued all night as Nina tossed and turned. Morning came. Dreary eyed, unrested, she got out of bed and pulled on her clothes. Outside, she walked and walked in the weak early morning light. Street after street was silent; she was the only person in the world. Within the neat, tranquil houses she passed, rested the happy families of Halifax. The bushes bordering their walls glowed whitely with dew. Here and there, she could see a spider’s web, specially encrusted.

The stillness around her added to her desolation. Her warm bed now seemed cosiness itself, as did her kitchen, her routine and meals cooked with Ananda. It was not a bad life. Ananda was always saying keep it simple. She would go home, and make up with him. For her world to be in order, there had to be love between her husband and herself.

vi

Nina and Anton found it convenient to have sex on Wednesday afternoons. The three hour gap between The History of the Book and Introduction to Systems Analysis did nicely.

By now Nina had grown to love the room in which Anton lived. The walls were painted black, so was the furniture. In the middle hung a light enclosed by a red paper Chinese lampshade with hanging golden tassels. The room was in perpetual shadow, blurring the distance between night and day, between sex and fulfilment.

The previous guy was a ghoul, said Anton, but made no move to change any of it. The rent was sixty five dollars a month, he was trying to live as cheaply as possible. A woman called Sue Lin lived in the next room, he and she cooked on a stove in the landing. Next to the stove was a small, rickety fridge—one shelf for Sue Lin, one for Anton.

Sue Lin was a graduate student in English. Her long black hair hung limply to her shoulders, her round face had little pouches under black eyes. Her mouth was small and red, her teeth white and uneven. Nina asked Anton a lot of questions about Sue Lin; she was jealous of any young woman with an undetermined future.

On this particular day Nina was lying in bed, her post-coital shawl wrapped around her. She found Anton’s room cold. The intense black added to the chill. The summer holidays were approaching; Anton would leave for New York, and the thought of no contact for three months gave Nina a hollow feeling. She pulled his arm around her chest, and idly gazed at the contrast of their skins. With Ananda her skin was so much lighter, with Anton so much darker.

He raised himself on one shoulder. The bed sighed, a muted sound compared to the groans it had emitted earlier.

‘I’ve got a summer job.’

‘You have? Where?’

‘The New York Public Library.’

‘Oh.’

Invariably he curbed her curiosity with facts: bare, dry and reluctant.

‘Is it nice, the New York Public Library?’ she asked.

‘Is it nice! It’s beautiful. Like being in a cathedral.’

‘Really?’

‘Why, it’s one of the tourist spots of New York.’

‘Really?’

‘Uh-huh. Why don’t you come and see it one day?’

‘Perhaps I will.’

‘What are you doing this summer?’

‘I don’t know—maybe going to India.’

‘Wow! Lakshmi and I would really love to visit India.’

‘Well, why don’t you? Lakshmi should discover her roots.’

‘I know. But we can’t afford it yet. For now we are going to explore the Maritimes. She’s coming up in the first week of June.’

This was too much for Nina. His relationship with his wife was obviously flourishing, while she was an unimportant pastime. To be sure he had never offered any reason to think differently.

He proved his noble non-attachment to the woman he so casually fucked by telling Nina how little leave Lakshmi got, and how much easier it was for him to go down one weekend in the month.

What he was really doing was reminding her of the limits within which they operated. They were rigorous, these limits, and they demanded severe compartmentalisation of body, mind and heart, of word and thought, of the apartment at Hollin Court and of the little black room at Murray Place.

She got up and started dressing.

‘Hey, you ok?’

The feelings which had driven her to this situation were now being told to die. Yes, she said, yes, she was ok.

The last day of term. Among the students, general jubilation, exchanging of summer plans and job information. Between Anton and Nina, nothing. Anton seemed to consider their goodbyes said. Nina had to run to catch up with him on his brisk way home.

‘Anton, wait up.’

‘Oh, hi, Nina.’

‘I wanted to say bye to you.’

‘Oh, baby, didn’t we say bye to each other that afternoon?’

How could one man’s voice sound so sexy?

‘Yes, but you know I am going to India.’

Silently they walked along, parting at the corner with goodbyes that touched no depths. The summer stretched long and lonely in front of Nina, with only Ananda and her thoughts for company. All the holidays held was a part-time job at the HRL, a lie about a trip to India and the slowly forming resolution to put Anton behind her. No marriage could take such strain.

‘I wish we lived in India,’ she said to Ananda that night. ‘Can’t we at least visit?’

It was after dinner and there was silence between them. This was very dreadful for Nina. A couple who have nothing to talk about are in a bad state, and she often babbled simply so this would not happen. Today she was tired and depressed, babble did not come easily.

How had they spent all those evenings together, when now one of them seemed so unending? Her heart was heavy, in other circumstances she might have considered it to be breaking.

She contemplated the months that would pass without the particular comfort of seeing Anton and found she couldn’t bear it. Her state alarmed her; it was so inimical to marriage.

‘Please, can’t we go to India?’ she repeated.

‘What for?’ asked Ananda.

‘I think it’s easier on marriages. You have a family, you have friends, they all back you up. I loved being with your sister, Ila, Ishan…’

‘Why do you need backing up?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There is just you and me here. Not even children.’

‘We have our work, recognition, status, a better standard of living. Look at the way your mother lives.’

‘You judge by superficials,’ she replied crossly.

He felt she was denigrating all he had given her.

Although he tried to never compare the women in his life, Ananda ended up doing this constantly. Now he thought one nice thing about Mandy was that he never had to have conversations about India with her. She wasn’t even curious; she had never said, like so many people did, that India was a place she had always wanted to visit. Occasionally he realised she thought people lived in trees among tigers roaming the jungle; these impressions he never bothered to correct. In her company he was just a man, a man who happened to have a dark skin—really anybody from almost anywhere.

Meanwhile Nina was hurrying on—she knew her husband was fixated on this country, and she didn’t think she could stand another conversation on how grateful she should be.

‘Everything is clearer at home.’

‘Clearer? What do you mean?’

‘Nothing, nothing. Still it’s unnatural to not even visit. It’s been almost two years.’

‘If you ask me it’s unnatural to live in one place and be always thinking about another.’ And, he continued, people’s teeth did not know vacations. His first visit had been after seven years.

Seven years. Did he want her to do likewise?

She kept to herself how much she longed to see her mother. That love had a purity it would be a relief to experience after all the complications she had suffered in its name.

A few days later, Ananda announced he had a surprise. He had bought her a ticket home; she could spend two months there.

A gift from heaven. Thank you, Ananda, thank you.

Privately she was suspicious. A man who objected to a Mills Brothers purchase, who constantly told her of his debts—why was he spending four hundred and fifty dollars on a ticket to India?

Ananda congratulated himself. He had dealt with the whole thing nicely. Nina’s trip to India would give him space to sort things out with Mandy. He was going to be circumspect next time, confine himself to flings. The strain and secrecy of his affair were getting too complicated for him to handle. He liked to keep things simple, and the longer his affair lasted, the less simple it was.

‘Two months is a long time,’ said his wife uncertainly.

‘I thought you would be pleased.’

‘Yes, of course I am.’

She was going home. Suspicion could wait.

vii

So Nina’s summer lie turned true.

‘Why don’t you join me?’ she asked Ananda, guilty in her relief.

He had equal cause to be relieved, but those causes lay in Halifax. For two months he would enjoy a close approximation to bachelor status. One woman was a prison, many contained the variety of the world.

Idly he thought he should have been born in an earlier age, when Hindu men could marry as often as they pleased.

‘I have to catch up with things here. Besides, two tickets to India is more than I can afford.’

As usual the spectre of money silenced her.

Ananda, driving to Clayton Park, thought of all that Mandy had done for him and regretted that its novelty was wearing off. Her charm had lain in her generous, white, uninhibited body. His gratitude that at last he had entrance to an unexplored country had been strong. But Mandy was also fixated on receiving, and therein lay the rub. No country should levy such high taxes.

At the very least he must loosen her stranglehold on his spare time. He went over the story he was going to tell her and admired its cleverness. It ran thus: his wife had found out about his affair and was going home to his sister, giving him two months in which to chose. Family honour did not allow him to abandon the woman they had selected for him. This might be hard for Mandy to accept, but she must know that immigrants came with old world values.

Mandy was not moved by this tale. He was a doctor, a huge step up the social ladder for her, and she had hoped for permanence with him.

‘I think you’re a coward,’ she said, ‘using your wife as an excuse. Maybe she came to Canada because of you, but she’s studying for a library degree, she’s going to work here. How does it matter what some family in India thinks? If you cared so much, you would have gone with her.’

He looked hunted, the weak point in his narrative only now apparent.

‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’

‘No, no.’

‘Good. Because you and me are an item, aren’t we, Andy?’ She stood behind him, her arms folded around his chest, her fingers inside his waistband, unbuttoning, searching, touching. These methods had often been very successful.

‘Maybe I should meet your wife,’ she murmured. ‘After all we have a lot in common.’

He stiffened. ‘Don’t even think of it.’

‘Why? Are you ashamed of me?’

‘Of course not—besides, I told you, she’s not here.’

‘I know how to wait,’ said Mandy.

Meanwhile the wife was preoccupied with thoughts of home. Every hour on the flight brought her five hundred miles closer. Her mother and Alka would be at the airport to greet her. During her visit, she would make sure her mother did not worry about money for a single second. Now that she was the mistress of convertible currency they could even go to a hill station for a holiday.

As she walked down the plane steps, she encountered a heat so severe she could hardly breathe. How would she manage months of this, was her first thought, her second amazement that in two years she could become so delicate. She had been careful not to change, careful that her accent remain the same, that she not get used to convenience, comfort or cold air, but unbeknownst to her she had.

Her mother greets her with tears in her eyes. Her daughter is looking lovely—taller, thinner, clear skinned.

‘Beta, beta,’ she murmurs. She chokes with happiness while Alka looks indulgently at the sentient drama in front of her, repeated in groups all over the airport.

They drive home. As the hot air blows against her face and dries the sweat on it, Nina looks eagerly out of the car window. She experiences some disappointment: the landscape is inextricably poor and third world, low squat hovels line many of the roads, their decrepit nature obvious even in the moonlit night.

The nostalgia she has anticipated comes as the car nears Jangpura. There is the bend into the colony, the bus stop, the shut iron gate of the house, the hooded car in front.