Read Online We Are Not in Pakistan by Shauna Singh Baldwin - Free Book Online Page B

said he couldn’t understand her accent on her call-ins, and she might as well forget it because it wasn’t his fault she heard Ramana when he’d said Ramada.
    Naina turns the key, flicks the light switch. Not much here, but something to call her own. A lumpy Murphy bed, its two legs permanently lowered to the parquet floor, a desk and chair she and Stanford bought together from a junk dealer on Spadina, books piled on a low-legged piri from the family home in Malton.A yeasty smell rises around her from the boulangerie below.
    She lowers her weight to the seat in the bay window that bulges over Edgewood Street, not bothering to raise the blinds.
    The ache again, at the small of her back.
    When I know who sent you, baby, then I’ll know to whom I must deliver you. But till then, you stay with me, achcha?
    Sunita — “call me Sue” — is svelte in a sage green polo-neck tunic and black tights. Arriving as emissary from her aunt, Naina’s mother, like a finger extended outdoors to test a chill wind, she is the only one who still comes to see Naina from the family. She has nothing to gain, Naina reminds herself, nothing whatsoever, by driving all the way east and spending several toonies to park her white BMW in the parking lot across the street. Nothing to gain but satisfaction.
    â€œWhy don’t you tell your Daddyji sorry — buss! That’s all it takes. One little word and you can be back ek dum, no problem.”
    But this is the problem.
    â€œI have done nothing wrong,” says Naina. “All I committed was love. There is too little of it, so I felt it. Enough for all of us.”
    â€œLove, shove.” Sunita’s laugh could peel the dingy blue paint from the walls. “What happened to your gora guy now? Not that I’m saying you did anything wrong, mind you — you were just young and foolish. All I’m saying is now you should say sorry. Then we can all meet together — no more of this, ’I can’t tell anyone I’m going to see Naina, but everyone knows and gives me secret messages for her.’ So I’m just asking, does it hurt you to say it, or what?”
    â€œNo,” says Naina. “Saying sorry would not hurt my flesh. It would not break a bone. It will not make me bleed. It will not killme, that is true. But, Sunita, I am
not
sorry. It’s important to me to mean what I say.”
    â€œCall me Sue,” Sunita says automatically. “But I ask you, what is the harm in
saying
it? What does it cost you? Just to please everyone.” A frustrated click of the tongue. “You really have no sense, Naina. Fourteen years! Even Ram returned home after fourteen years exile.”
    â€œHe was a god, he was a king — men can return home once they do what they have to do.”
    â€œSuch funny ways you see things, Naina. All this women’s libber talk, see where it brought you?” Sue’s hand rising to her nose ring jingles a wristful of twenty-two-carat gold bangles. “Lose a little weight,” she advises kindly, three-inch heels clopping to the apartment door. “Otherwise, even if you make up, how will Uncle and Aunty find you a match? They’ll have to find a widower or even a divorced fellow now, but still you have a chance. Then you can have children just like mine. Think what I’m saying — one little word.”
    The baby shifts appreciatively as Sunita leaves. A tiny fist punches suddenly, stretching Naina’s lost waist. She strokes it, crooning, “Chanda mama dur ho …”
    In the evening, Naina puts on her hat, mittens and coat and climbs on the 509 streetcar. Downtown, she and the baby within rise in a carpeted cell to the top of a tinted glass skyscraper. There she bends and straightens, emptying garbage cans and sorting paper from plastic to ready it for rebirth. She wipes a rag gently around the computer brooding in suspended mode in the corner of each