innocent-looking items that contained pork by-products, from bread to toothpaste. What is a by-product? Please come. He was said to be considering.
On weekend evenings most Dar Shamsis went to the mosque, held at a school gym on Eglinton Avenue, a destination every bus driver on the 26 route had come to recognize, at which he would let off nervous newcomers whether the stop button had been pressed or not. The newcomer, gazing intently out of the window at familiar-looking people converging in small groups to a place he didn’t quite know, would look up thankfully at the driver and step down with relief, spirits already soaring.
At the mosque a mukhi sat presiding from under a basketball ring. Here after prayers the newcomers announced themselves: tourists seeking spouses, jobs, ultimately reasons to stay; immigrants, en route to Calgary, Edmonton, or Vancouver, or simply staying in Toronto; visitors from south of the border. Once they had announced themselves the news would spread. So-and-so has come. What news from Dar? What price sugar? Do they mug you yet in the mosque in New York? And if they were staying in the city, the insurance agents would brace themselves, taking notes, keeping tabs – when the so-and-so’s found a job, when an apartment. And finally some evening one of them would knock onthe door – a former teacher perhaps, his own genial self, with all the authority of his old status, asking a thousand ifs – pointing out at once the virtues and the shaky foundations of this new existence. Insure, not against revolutions, but death.
On Saturday evenings after mosque, Nurdin and Zera would watch TV with the children. Or leaving them in the apartment, they would go up to the eighteenth floor to the open house, to watch people playing cards and to chitchat over tea, to find out the news in Dar – the status of roads and food prices and the dollar price – all, reassuringly, bad. And, perhaps, to meet “the boys,” as Zera called them, the two new friends they had made, and if “the boys” were so inclined, to bring them home.
6
In the cavernous lobby of Sixty-nine, somewhat away from the path of the daily traffic, is a circular platform raised a foot and a half high, often used as a bench. In the centre, seated on a stool, a plaster goddess takes in with dumb composure all that goes on in the lobby, the comings and goings, the rendezvous, the daily battles with the elevators. Nude, long legged, her one hand rests purposely on her lap, the other raised to hold up something that’s long been dislodged. She is, for all those who pass under her stony gaze, a real, if a little mysterious, presence. Her nose is bruised, giving her the look of an antiquestatue, and the white plaster of her substance has invited many a creative hand to improvise on her features with chalk and markers, which the successive supers have patiently tried to wipe clean, leaving instead a dull grey skin. The lap has enough room so that on a Friday or Saturday night you might see some drunk taking comfort. Sometimes the raised hand holds a flower or a book or an umbrella, other times something more private or obscene. And once a pious Hindu pressed the lady into the ranks of the gopis by placing beside her a brass statuette of the flute player, the gopi-seducer Krishna.
Under the neutral gaze of this Aphrodite or Lakshmi, some male inhabitants of Sixty-nine would gather in the mornings to discuss “life and politics,” while their wives or mothers would be out at work or rolling chappatis upstairs in the apartments or, to be fair, out on their own breaks. This was the Don Mills A-T, men sitting in a circle on the goddess’s platform, and standing around, sipping tea, sharing snacks, chatting.
At a little after nine in the morning Jamal would descend in an elevator, clutching close to him an old black briefcase. If you happened to be with him and wondered out loud, or silently with a sniff, to inquire where the smell of samosas
On weekend evenings most Dar Shamsis went to the mosque, held at a school gym on Eglinton Avenue, a destination every bus driver on the 26 route had come to recognize, at which he would let off nervous newcomers whether the stop button had been pressed or not. The newcomer, gazing intently out of the window at familiar-looking people converging in small groups to a place he didn’t quite know, would look up thankfully at the driver and step down with relief, spirits already soaring.
At the mosque a mukhi sat presiding from under a basketball ring. Here after prayers the newcomers announced themselves: tourists seeking spouses, jobs, ultimately reasons to stay; immigrants, en route to Calgary, Edmonton, or Vancouver, or simply staying in Toronto; visitors from south of the border. Once they had announced themselves the news would spread. So-and-so has come. What news from Dar? What price sugar? Do they mug you yet in the mosque in New York? And if they were staying in the city, the insurance agents would brace themselves, taking notes, keeping tabs – when the so-and-so’s found a job, when an apartment. And finally some evening one of them would knock onthe door – a former teacher perhaps, his own genial self, with all the authority of his old status, asking a thousand ifs – pointing out at once the virtues and the shaky foundations of this new existence. Insure, not against revolutions, but death.
On Saturday evenings after mosque, Nurdin and Zera would watch TV with the children. Or leaving them in the apartment, they would go up to the eighteenth floor to the open house, to watch people playing cards and to chitchat over tea, to find out the news in Dar – the status of roads and food prices and the dollar price – all, reassuringly, bad. And, perhaps, to meet “the boys,” as Zera called them, the two new friends they had made, and if “the boys” were so inclined, to bring them home.
6
In the cavernous lobby of Sixty-nine, somewhat away from the path of the daily traffic, is a circular platform raised a foot and a half high, often used as a bench. In the centre, seated on a stool, a plaster goddess takes in with dumb composure all that goes on in the lobby, the comings and goings, the rendezvous, the daily battles with the elevators. Nude, long legged, her one hand rests purposely on her lap, the other raised to hold up something that’s long been dislodged. She is, for all those who pass under her stony gaze, a real, if a little mysterious, presence. Her nose is bruised, giving her the look of an antiquestatue, and the white plaster of her substance has invited many a creative hand to improvise on her features with chalk and markers, which the successive supers have patiently tried to wipe clean, leaving instead a dull grey skin. The lap has enough room so that on a Friday or Saturday night you might see some drunk taking comfort. Sometimes the raised hand holds a flower or a book or an umbrella, other times something more private or obscene. And once a pious Hindu pressed the lady into the ranks of the gopis by placing beside her a brass statuette of the flute player, the gopi-seducer Krishna.
Under the neutral gaze of this Aphrodite or Lakshmi, some male inhabitants of Sixty-nine would gather in the mornings to discuss “life and politics,” while their wives or mothers would be out at work or rolling chappatis upstairs in the apartments or, to be fair, out on their own breaks. This was the Don Mills A-T, men sitting in a circle on the goddess’s platform, and standing around, sipping tea, sharing snacks, chatting.
At a little after nine in the morning Jamal would descend in an elevator, clutching close to him an old black briefcase. If you happened to be with him and wondered out loud, or silently with a sniff, to inquire where the smell of samosas
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