Stealing Nasreen Read online

  Stealing Nasreen

  There’s an awful lot going on in Farzana Doctor’s fascinating first novel, Stealing Nasreen. Touching on themes of grief, desire and assimilation, Doctor lays out an ambitious array of characters and dilemmas and … pulls them together with admirable skill…. This unique contribution to CanLit probes the problems and joys of creating an open, diverse society.

  —Now Magazine

  The process of leaving one’s country and finding a sense of belonging in another is often rife with uncertainty and turmoil. What makes Stealing Nasreen such a riveting read is the way it takes this uncertainty and makes it even more complex by adding sexuality and desire to the angst-filled immigrant experience. Stealing Nasreen reveals the intricacies of human relationships, but more importantly, it is an eye-opening critique of the multicultural dream.

  —Quill and Quire

  Farzana Doctor’s first novel offers a study in linked solitudes and secrets…. The truly gratifying part of Stealing Nasreen … [and] what has stayed with me are the unerring interior dramas: Shaffiq despairing for his family’s future; Nasreen, in a trance of sadness, hovering near the edge of a subway platform; Salma thinking with sweet regret of Raj, her lost Mumbai lover.”

  —Globe and Mail

  You don’t get a novel more Torontonian than Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen and you don’t have to be of South Asian descent to relate to the characters in a story that hinges on the worlds of the first- and second-generation immigrants in this multicultural city…. There are glimpses of brilliant—and funny—observations by the writer.

  —Desi Life (Toronto Star)

  Stealing Nasreen

  a novel by

  Farzana Doctor

  INANNA Publications and Education Inc.

  Toronto, Canada

  Copyright © 2007 Farzana Doctor

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Doctor, Farzana

  Stealing nasreen : a novel / by Farzana Doctor

  (Inanna poetry and fiction series)

  ISBN 978-0-9782233-0-4

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8607.O35S74 2007 C813'.6 C2007-902490-4

  Cover design by Valerie Fullard

  Interior design by Luciana Ricciutelli

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.yorku.ca/inanna

  For Judith,

  the first to call me “writer.”

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgemens

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  SHAFFIQ SCRATCHES THE STUBBLE on his chin and pushes his cleaning cart sluggishly down the long hallway. It is just seven p.m., only the beginning of his shift. He rounds a corner, and then stops for a moment to retrieve a Walkman from his bag. He slips the earphones over his head and allows the Greatest Hits of Bollywood II to saturate the silence around him.

  He listens for his favourite song, number two on Side A: Dum Maro Dum. Ah, here it is. He closes his eyes, imagining the black-haired, fair-skinned songstress trilling out her high-pitched longing. He sways to the tune, taking his cleaning cart as his dance partner. He opens his eyes and once again sees the bland institutional walls around him. He sighs.

  He hates working the night shift. He is bitter that he is working in darkness and sleeping through the afternoon sun. He misses the world’s regular rhythms. Right now, he should be sitting at home with his family, eating his daal and rice, watching Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Somewhere deep in his heart he believes that this must be a sacrilege of some kind, a crime against nature, even.

  He empties the garbage bin in the Vice President’s office. Stuck to the bottom are the two halves of a woman’s photograph. Shaffiq holds the pieces together, admiring the puzzle she makes. He decides that he likes her eyes and that she is a good-looking white woman. He pockets the torn photo and considers its possibilities. Why did the torn-up woman end up in the Vice-President’s garbage? Is he cheating on his wife, that silver-haired lady in the framed portrait on his desk? Carrying on with his cleaning, he imagines love affairs as he scrubs toilets, conflicts and ruined lives while mopping floors, and heartbreaking betrayals when emptying garbage cans. This is the kind of drama he catches on Maury at three-thirty. He wonders, not for the first time, if his thinking has become more melodramatic since moving to Canada.

  He has made a habit of studying the clues left behind by the daytime workers: the half-eaten lunches, candy bar wrappers, the stains on carpets. He notices if some maverick has snuck a smoke in the bathroom, discarding the butt in the sink, even though the sign clearly says “Smoking prohibited – penalty $2000.” He looks at the beginnings of notes and memos that get crumpled up in mid-sentence. He uses all these clues to construct stories about the people who work here. His sleuthing helps pass the time and relieves the monotony of his work.

  He’ll bring the photo home and show it to Salma. She’ll get a laugh out of it. Then he’ll store it away in his top drawer along with the other bits of clues and curiosities he has picked up at work: a going-away card for Louise who retired (which unfortunately had very few well-wishes), a crumpled bowtie he found at the top of a recycling bin, and Mr. Sneider’s discarded Atavan prescription. He doesn’t like to throw these things away.

  Upstairs, Nasreen says good-bye to her last client of the day. She stretches her arms over her head, arching her long back and then sits down heavily at her desk to write her notes. This task prolongs her workday by twenty minutes, but she prefers to complete her reports before going home rather than leaving them for the next day. She gathers together all her client files and arranges them alphabetically in a steel cabinet. She collects the stray pens and pencils on her desk and corrals them into their places, sliding open drawers and shutting them again efficiently. Her eyes linger a moment on a gold box on top of her desk, its lustre and fine details pleasing her. She moves it slightly, centering its position. Satisfied with the state of her desk, she switches off her computer and desk lamp. In t
he half-light of her office, the gold box shines, beckoning her. She reaches for it, opens the lid slightly and then snaps it shut again. She grabs her coat and bag and hastily steps out into the empty corridor.

  Shaffiq stops his cart in front of the washrooms near the building’s rear exit. He takes off his Walkman and selects his cleaning supplies. There are three different bottles of identical-looking aquamarine fluid that he must spray, pour, and wipe over everything. The solvents cause his stomach to rumble, his lunch and bile coming up for an instant, before being swallowed down again.

  He hears footsteps coming down the corridor. Checking his watch, he sees that it is just past nine o’clock. Who is here this late? Usually, just as he arrives for his shift, the last bunch of daytime workers are rushing to the back doors, eager for the sane, cool air outside.

  Except her. He has seen her many times since he started working here three months ago. She has always stood out to him. Not only because she works so late, but because she doesn’t seem anxious to leave this place. And, of course he recognizes Home in this woman. She has those features so like the women in his family: the round-oval face with the strong, but not too large nose; the full lips; the dark almond eyes that will grow creases in their corners the more she laughs. She has long black hair that almost reaches her bottom, so much like his mother’s. Indeed, she does remind him of his mother. Only, this girl is blessed with height; he estimates that she must be what, five-four, five-five?

  Despite her familiarity, there is also something vaguely foreign about her. It is in the way she walks with that busy, hurried tightness in the hips. There is also that disinterested, closed look in her eyes. Shaffiq guesses that maybe she has lived here longer than he, and perhaps has become more Canadian too. He wonders if his daughters will become like this one day, possessing the faces of their elders but the expressions and strides of strangers.

  Recently, he has tried to be friendly to her, to say hello, to look directly into her dark eyes the way people do in Canada. A few nights ago, while mopping near the back door, he said to her, “Hello, hello! How are you tonight?” At first he wondered if he was being too forward, if she took offence at the question. Her eyes darted between his face and the back door as though she were afraid of him. She answered him with a curt “I’m fine thank you,” her tone telling him that she was not scared, but irritated, and so he lowered his eyes to the grey linoleum and continued his cleaning.

  Tonight, he decides to try again. As he bends down to empty a garbage can, he sees her polished black boots approaching, her presence filling the long hallway. Straightening slightly, he looks over his shoulder and beams at her with a broad gap-toothed grin.

  “Hello, hello! How are you? What is your name? I see you often here.” She continues walking but slows her pace a little. She settles her gaze on him for just a moment.

  “Nas. Actually, it’s really Nasreen.” She picks up her pace and is out the doors before he can tell her that his name is Shaffiq. Before he can tell her that he comes from India and has been here for over two years. That he got this job in July, almost three months ago, after looking for so long. That he isn’t really a janitor. He doesn’t know why, but he wants to tell her all this and more. Like how he looked for work everyday until he felt a kind of helplessness and humiliation he has never felt before. Like how useless he felt while his wife and children left every morning and returned each afternoon to him sitting on the couch. He doesn’t say any of this. A gust of cold air let in by her departure chills him. After a moment, he shrugs off Nasreen’s bad manners and finishes the bathroom. So now he knows her name, at least. He chooses to see this as progress.

  Nasreen pulls her long coat around her, shivering in the cold, the janitor’s sweet smell of patchouli still lingering in her nostrils. She likes the scent and wonders for a moment if it is his cologne, but then registers the smell as incense. He must burn a lot of it at home, she thinks. She sniffs the cuff of her own coat and smells damp wool.

  The streetcar lumbers up to her stop and she races across the street, dodging a man on a bicycle. She boards the streetcar and heads toward the back where there are a few empty seats. She feels the fabric of the seat before sitting down (you never know who has emptied their bladder at the back of a streetcar) and then settles herself behind a man on a cell phone, talking too loudly to someone.

  “Well, we just passed Beverley, no, now we are at Huron,” the man says. “Do you want me to meet you at Bathurst, or should I walk the three blocks over?” Nasreen bristles and moves to another seat further back to get away from the cell phone tour guide.

  Now, in a quieter seat, she reviews her day, trying to remember the stream of clients she saw. How many? She lists them off in her mind. First there was the women’s anxiety group, or WAG for short. Then there was Josie, Angela, Miranda, and Cora, back to back in the late afternoon. That’s six hours of counseling, she calculates, pressing her throbbing temples.

  It was Miranda who really wore out Nasreen today. At least she was cooperative, and Nasreen appreciates that in a client, especially when she is tired. And she has felt tired for a long time now. Overtired. Maybe burned out, even. I have to start going back to the gym, she thinks. Get myself in shape.

  At Palmerston, the streetcar jerks to an abrupt stop, interrupting Nasreen’s thoughts. She sits up in her seat, and along with the other passengers, cranes her neck left and right to see the source of the trip’s disruption. A middle-aged man staggers across the street slowly, wearing only a pair of boxers and a red Santa hat. He’s yelling something, his muscled arms raised in some kind of victorious salute to himself. A woman in an SUV pulls up beside the streetcar and begins honking at the man. The other streetcar passengers, who at first were quiet, perhaps unsure how to assess the situation, begin chuckling and talking amongst themselves about the seemingly crazy or intoxicated man blocking the road.

  The woman in the seat ahead of her has opened the window wide, leaning her head out to get a better look at the spectacle. Nasreen pulls her wool coat around her against the chill of the autumn evening. She wants to admonish the passengers-turned-audience, wants to tell them to keep quiet, to shut their windows. She has seen this scantily-clad Santa near the entrance of the hospital before and she feels protective of him, wishes she could stop his humiliating performance.

  Eventually, the man stumbles across the road and clears the way. The streetcar lumbers forward, and Nasreen turns in her seat to see the man talking animatedly to pedestrians on the sidewalk. Each gives him a wide berth as they pass by him.

  She turns back around in her seat, and rubs her neck. There is a familiar strain there, an ache that travels from her jawbone to her shoulder. As she massages the tension there, her mind shifts back to Miranda.

  “When I was a kid, my father and I would practically do acrobatics to drag my mother out of bed. That went on for years until she finally got diagnosed with depression,” Miranda told her, taking in a deep breath, her pink cheeks filling with air. “After being medicated, she started to feel better and began to take part in family stuff again. We were all really relieved about that. Then two years ago, a day before my birthday, she went out and stepped in front of a casino tour bus,” Miranda explained, with little emotion.

  Nasreen sometimes marvels at the ease with which some of her clients are able to reveal shameful secrets, intimate details, and harrowing stories. Nasreen nodded at Miranda and tried to look empathetic, the two Therapist Skills she relies on most when she can’t think of anything to say. She wondered how she would bring Miranda back to the task at hand. She still had the rest of the intake forms to fill out.

  A group of East Asian girls gets on the streetcar, giggling loudly and Nasreen watches them settle into nearby seats. They wear the funky orange tones and shiny synthetics that Nasreen recognizes as teeny-bopper club wear. She feels boxed in by their warm cheery bodies. She shifts her hips and tote bag to make more room for
herself and the girl beside her interprets this to be as an invitation to take even more space. Nasreen studies the girl’s amber plastic skirt and then looks out the window, steering her mind back to Miranda.

  “I guess I started drinking when I was fifteen or sixteen. I began nipping into the basement bar. Nothing serious. Anyway, I didn’t start to drink heavily until two years ago, after she killed herself.”

  “I see,” Nasreen said, knowing that this response was not quite adequate.

  After Miranda left, Nasreen locked her office door and struggled to pull open the bottom drawer of her steel filing cabinet. The old, stiff drawer resisted and so she crouched down, putting all her weight into the effort. Finally it jerked open, hurling her backwards onto her ass. Undeterred, she steadied herself on her haunches and searched through some loose papers and books. Underneath she found the three chocolate bars she had hidden there. She hesitated for a moment, giving cursory attention to resisting them. Then she grabbed them all, kicked the drawer shut and mindlessly ingested them while contemplating the case note for Miranda’s visit.

  “How do I summarize the pain of a whole life and a mother’s suicide?” She wondered.

  “What?” The teenager in plastic asks her. Nasreen orients herself back to the present, on the streetcar, among the girls. Did she say that out loud? Nasreen looks at the girl’s black-lined eyes. Embarrassed, she pulls herself up, sees that they have reached Dovercourt. She pushes past the girl and moves toward the back door. It’s OK, she tells herself, my stop is just two blocks away. I could use the exercise anyway. She rings the bell and steps off onto the cracked sidewalk, plodding briskly across College and then down Donald Street to her apartment. As she climbs the steps to the door, she hears the recognizable mewing of Id, who waits noisily for her dinner. Damn, Nasreen thinks, I forgot to fill his bowl this morning.

  Having cleaned half his floors, Shaffiq pushes his cart to a patient waiting area. He walks around the chairs and table, stooping to collect countless coffee cups from tables and overflowing garbage receptacles. He has never seen so many of them in his life. But then, it was never his job to hunt, gather, and then throw them out before. He finds the white cups everywhere, in lounges, in staff rooms, in waiting areas, in offices. He hates the smell of coffee, being a man true to his heritage, a tea drinker. Even in India the coffee is not this bitter, acrid liquid. Rather, there is cafelatte, thick and creamy and sweet. In the waiting room he stacks the magazines and wipes down the tables. He looks around to inspect the room, and decides that the vacuuming can wait another day. According to his supervisor, he is supposed to vacuum daily in the high traffic areas, but who can tell the difference? He wheels his cart toward the offices.