When She Was Queen by M.G. Vassanji Read Free Book Online

the hotel that was part of the wedding celebration.
    That incident, that night, ruined for her the rest of her life; her interest in her husband, in having children (though she did have a son). It filled her with depression, dread, hatred. If she didn’t take her life, it was due to that hate, for one man.
    “Who was he?”
    “As we checked out of the hotel, at the front desk sat the owner’s son—Salim Damani. He grinned at us and said something I dare not repeat—but it’s been playing in my head over and over like a tape ever since. It was he who had been peeping at us. In that moment he had stolen my entire existence, robbed me of my faith, any belief in anything … and he knew that I knew.”
    She looks at me with those intense eyes in that fineface. I realize again how soft her voice is, not having risen even once, and yet strangely so full of expression.
    “He had intruded into and defiled my most private, my woman’s moment. I could have killed him, gouged his eyes out—whenever I saw him standing outside the mosque in the evening with the other men; I could have torn out the flesh from that pocked face. One day on Jamhuri Street I saw his wife and small child crossing the road—he married not long after me—I was driving our Cortina, and there they were and I was glaring at them in all madness—but some good angel held me back. Salim was inside a shop and he came tearing out, perhaps having seen me through the door or shop window. I don’t know what I might have done in those days. Outwardly I was normal, I had a husband and a son, but inside I was seething, a wounded female seeking desperately somehow to avenge that offence, that violence done to me. How many times I wished he would simply die and rid me of him. Whenever I passed the mosque and read the chalkboard containing the latest death announcement, I would wish it were him, that if I rubbed out the name written there and wrote his instead, he would truly die.
    “When it became possible to come to Canada, Amir and I were among the first to apply—I couldn’t have stayed there a day longer than necessary, where
he
resided, that piece of filth who continued to pollute me with every sight I had of him.
    “I imagined him festering in Dar, in the heat and mud and the growing potholes and the smells of garbage not picked up….”
    While she removed herself to an antithetical cooler universe of temperance and restraint, order and form, sliding noiselessly into the future.
    In Toronto, Dar’s Asians found themselves in the new high-rises of Don Mills, which reminded one more and more of the hometown neighbourhoods as new immigrants, old acquaintances, arrived. You left on the 100 or the 26 bus to go to, to search for, work; weekends you shopped till you dropped, from discount store to discount store, across the city, when a dollar meant so much more. Remembered from this distance in time, they were days of shame, when none of us had cars and we travelled in flocks on public transit fearing racial taunts and attacks. Anaar found a job almost immediately, like many of the women, as a typist; Amir languished from one unsuitable job to the next. He was in his forties, not especially suited to anything though capable and more than willing, and was soon humiliated and broken, all his former stature gone. But they worked hard, put up the down payment for a car, then for a house in a new development.
    A rented room in the basement of the Flemingdon Park Mall was the first mosque. There, every evening, especially Fridays, you went to be part of one big communal family. You exchanged news from home (the worse it got there, the better you felt here) and met new arrivals, you found out about all the specials at the food, clothing, and furniture stores in town. One Friday evening, her eye alighting upon a new attendee at this makeshift mosque, her heart sank and she gave a whimper: “Y’Allah!” It was Salim Damani—older, humbler:taking around a brazier