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

smoking with incense among the male congregation. It did not take her long to detect Salim’s wife sitting two rows in front of her.
    It was as well she and her husband moved to their house in York Mills. But after a year, like many others, the Damanis followed suit and she kept running into him at the new mosque there. Of course he was now a respectable member of the community. But she continued to hate him with the bitterest bile, never replied to his unctuously uttered “God bless, sister.”
    Once, in front of people, he manipulated her into shaking hands with him, and on another occasion, during a community picnic, when everyone had joined in for a game of “dodge-the-ball,” he put himself in a position close behind her. She gave a howl of anguish, which in the merriment of the occasion no one else quite heeded; but he knew. And she was sure he had done it on purpose.
    She retired from the game, went home early. And that night she cried her heart out, wept and wept, no one could stop her, until she’d washed herself out, and fell asleep.
    Years passed. Her son grew up. She and her husband held office in the community, earned respect, became established. The fire in her abated, but did not die altogether. Finally, twenty years after their arrival in Toronto, her husband brought home the news one morning from the mosque—
    “Salim Damani died—last night.”
    She gasped. “How?”
    “Heart attack—while working around the house. His wife says he was tired and had sat down to rest in theliving room in front of the TV—that’s where he passed away. Did you know he was part owner of two hotels?”
    “Do you think I overdid it—my anger?” she asks.
    I look away, at the ceiling, which is dark and in shadow, at the glory of lights that is Yonge Street down below. How can I ever imagine what it meant to her, that one scorching moment in the life of a tender, raw nineteen-year-old girl back home, and what that moment did to all the other moments of her life? But I feel a heavy sense of sadness in me, I cannot tell you quite why. And I also feel a hint of anger, or bitterness, I know not where to direct it.

The Sky to Stop Us
    His wife had left him. Her
sports car was not in the driveway, the pool area normally cacophonous at this hour with the screams and laughter of his daughter Zafira and her neighbourhood friends seemed weirdly forlorn; there was no sign of the kitchen having seen use recently, and there were four phone messages, the first one from 12:12, as one of their friends precisely logged it. And there was this note on the tablein the family room:
I’ve gone away for a while with Z, will call you later. I want to think things over for myself
.—
A
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    How serious was it? He brought his chilled beer glass to his chin and mulled over that, feeling suddenly uncontrollably tearful. It’s the tiredness; you want to come home at night to pour out your frustrations and be comforted, not for this. What did it mean? Had it been coming? Had he seen the symptoms? She had taken to making certain kinds of statements lately, to chaff him—so he had interpreted them.
One of these days I should leave you
. The idea had seemed unthinkable. The remarks would needle him, for how easily they came to her; why make them, he had thought, why the empty threats? Not so empty now. And right in the midst of a major deal worth millions, many millions perhaps … right when the world was his, theirs, for those with the guts and the smarts to take and hold in their hands; opportunities, vistas, were opening up before them one after another without end. Why would she want to put brakes on that, deny him all that?
    The telephone rang, quickly he picked it up. It was his father. Nazir’s fingers tightened around the receiver; just what he needed at this moment, like a hole in the head, to comfort his lonely old father in his cluttered room at the Victoria Park senior citizens’ apartments. Did you take your walk, he asked